Okay, y'all - this is my first time posting any of my fic on a public domain - be gentle! LOL! To take a cue from CIAddict - The characters from Law & Order Criminal Intent (or any L&O characters that may appear), are obvioiusly not owned by me. They are owned by Dick Wolf. This would also include any "guest" characters which are not regulars but appear in episodes, such as criminals or witnesses, and so forth. However, all others in the story are mine. The heroine, Emily and so forth.

I started this one sometime last year, around the anniversary of 9/11. The events are still so etched in my mind and I wanted to write about them, and so I decided to put some of my favorite CI characters and those I created into the path of that day. This story isn't about crime or criminals, the characters and their relationships are the "star", but there will obviously be mention of cases and so forth. If you're looking for a procedural or a case file, this might not be to your liking, but if you like a good romance and some deeply emotional kind of stuff, and you don't mind "alternate universe" kind of stuff, read on and enjoy. I also do the "what if" thing and so some things inevitably will change from what might be establishd on the actual show as situations and characters are introduced. I've got four chapters so far, and I'm proofing each one for tweaking of dialouge and such. Stay tuned.

Edited to add a quick synopsis - which I should have done last night! This is a work in progress, so the story isn't completely sewn up. I like giving Bobby a girlfriend, adding things to his life that fit in with his character and how I see him. Emily Ryan is my heroine, a young woman who followed her dream of being a dancer from her southern society roots in Charleston, SC to New York City. The story begins after she has already been promoted to principal dancer within her company (the name and dancers of which I've made up b/c it is simpler for creativity that way) and in her off time she is rennovating her Brooklyn brownstone, which just happens to be next door to the brownstone apartment building where Bobby lives. She's a fiery, passionate woman who has developed a friendship with Bobby and kept her true feelings for him hidden. He, in turn, has developed strong feelings for her as well, but in the interest of their easy camaradie, had kept his feelings hidden as well.

This is a story about relationships (Emily and Bobby - Emily and her mother - eventually Frances Goren will come into the picture as well) and about what happens when a sudden, tragic event throws your life into a tailspin and changes your outlook - makes you start thinking about what really matters to you.



The room was coming along nicely. Taking a step back from the window she had been working on, Emily surveyed the paintjob and decided that she was just as good on walls and trim as on canvas.

The old brownstone had just needed some tender loving care. She had been giving it just that, despite the protestations of her mother, who didn't understand what her daughter would want with an old brownstone in Brooklyn when she could have a penthouse in Manhattan.

It was an old argument, and one that had followed her from her roots in Charleston, South Carolina all the way to New York. It didn't matter that she had followed her heart, that she was doing what she loved. Her mother had never understood, but her father had.

His last request to her, before the cancer had taken him away, was that she would follow her dreams to Juilliard and be the prima ballerina she had always wanted to be.

She had done exactly that. Four years at Juilliard and then she had been asked to join the Romanoff Ballet Company by Madame Galina Romanoff herself. She had worked hard for that position, and realized the dream of her life. Music and dance were as much a part of her life as her own heart.

The name Emily Ryan was well known in the ballet world now, though it wasn't that which had been her goal. She only wanted to dance, and to teach. It was a gift she could give to the younger girls, her ability to encourage and to mentor each of them as they strived to find the beauty of the dance within themselves.

If dancing was her first love, painting and drawing came in a close second. She did those things mostly for herself, because she loved to put the things she saw on paper or canvas. Bobby had told her often enough that she should think about selling it, and she had thought about it a time or two, but she'd never pursued it.

Bobby. The very thought of him had her heart tripping. She'd been living next door to him for the past four months and during that time they'd become the best of friends. She knew he had no idea how she felt about him, which often struck her funny because he was one of the most astute people she had ever known.

A few months before she had met him, he'd been promoted to Detective First Grade and joined the Major Case Squad, which was the most prestigious department in the NYPD. Not for nothing had he earned a reputation for being brilliant at closing cases. He'd worked undercover in the Narcotics division in Brooklyn and run twenty-seven operations, which had led to twenty-seven convictions. A closed-case rating like that was something to be proud of, and he was, but not so anyone would ever know it.

Emily knew it, though. Four months had given her time enough to study him, to know him, and she had already deduced that, for him, being a cop wasn't just a way to make a living. He was dedicated to it. To the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of the evil that men do. And he was dedicated to bringing justice to the crime victims and their families.

She set her paint brush aside and moved back to the window, looked down at the tiny yard in back where she had been planting flowers and shrubs, turning the overgrown space into an oasis of colorful blooms and soothing scents.

It was how she'd met Bobby one day in mid-April. She'd been digging up old shrubs and tossing them into a wheelbarrow near the chain link fence that bordered her yard when she'd heard a voice call out a greeting.

She'd looked up, and into a handsome face with the most intense pair of brown eyes she had ever seen. He'd been leaning companionably on the fence, smiling at her, and introduced himself as Robert Goren, but it wasn't long before formalities were abandoned and she was calling him Bobby.

The brownstone next to hers had been converted into apartments and he lived in one of them, on the first floor. The yard behind his building was mostly dirt and gravel, and used as highly coveted off-street parking. He was often out there, tinkering with his car, or washing and waxing it.

He was there now, she saw, as she walked to the other window and looked down. The top was down and she stood for a moment admiring both man and car.

The car was a classic. A '65 Mustang GT with a shiny black paint job and a white ragtop. Lewis, his best friend since childhood, owned a body shop in Long Island City and Bobby had told her that he'd worked with him now and then, when the shop had first opened, before Lewis could afford full-time help. He had pitched in when he could, helped with oil changes and this and that.

"Lewis always did the 'real' stuff," he'd told her. "He swears he can't trust me with body work, but I did manage to keep more than one engine from falling on his head while he tried to adjust the mounts."

When he'd told her that, it had made him all the more appealing to her. She loved a man who could work on his car. Those in her world would never dream of dirtying their hands underneath the hood, much less sliding under the car to change the oil.

Was it fate or God's sense of humor that had given her into a family of wealth and status, and then given her a heart for the simple things in life? Her father had always said she had a true Irish heart, given over to romance and magic, and though she had great wealth, she didn't allow it to harden her, or make her into a snob. She knew what was important in life and treated her wealth as a gift she'd been given. Thinking of it that way made it impossible not to share what she had with others and when she gave to charities and to her parish, it was always with a simple heart that the money be used for whatever was needed most.

She spent it on herself as well, and had a closet full of shoes to prove it. And that made her smile and look down at Bobby again. He was forever teasing her about her obsession with shoes.

"Must be a girl thing," he had said one day, when he saw her struggling to unlock her front door while juggling three shopping bags, two of which were filled with shoe boxes. And then he'd taken two of the bags from her, his lips curving into that devastating smile he had that always turned her knees to mush.

She sighed, watching him now as he got out of his car, where he'd been wiping down the dash, and stood back, admiring his handiwork, she knew. There wasn't a man alive who didn't love to stare at his car. At least, that was her unqualified opinion.

He was so tall and good-looking. She couldn't help sighing again as he turned and she caught his profile as he pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his jeans and answered it.

Every bit of six-four, he had mile long legs and size thirteen feet. His arms were long, as were the fingers on those big hands that often touched her, mindless of the effect he had on her when he did. He was a big man, not lanky or even very slender, but there was a leanness to him, even with the broad chest and shoulders, the strong build that didn't narrow much at the hips, and he exuded a powerful energy that surrounded him like an aura.

He was quick on his feet, too. He moved like a big cat – like a sleek black panther, all fluid grace and long limbs. He was roguishly handsome with black hair that he kept in a Roman cut that left it long enough to curl, though he often tried to tame it. His face had a boyish quality to it, what her grandmother would have termed a baby face, with a jawline just strong enough to keep his face from being too rounded. His nose was short and straight, and his mouth had a nice shape to it with a bottom lip that was just a bit fuller than the top one.

It was a mouth that knew how to smile, she thought now as she watched him flip his phone shut and stuff it back into his pocket. And oh, did she love his smile.

Face it, girl, she told herself. You just plain love him.

And she did, though she didn't know what the heck to do about it. What could she do about it? He didn't see her that way. He saw her as a friend. She wasn't exactly "one of the guys"; she was too much of a girl for that, but what they had was an easygoing friendship and that was all.

She had no illusions about taming him and she knew he had a reputation as a ladies man, but from what she had seen he treated the women he dated very well. He wasn't one for serious relationships, though, and when his last relationship had ended, he'd lamented that fact to her even while she wished he could look at her and see the love in her eyes.

It wasn't that he didn't ever want to be serious, he had said, but he wondered sometimes if he could do it. And then there was the little matter of never finding the right woman. Women, he said, were forever trying to change him and he hadn't dated one yet that didn't try to mold him after they graduated past the casual stage.

She would never try to mold him. She loved him just like he was. Brilliant and funny, a tad compulsive and often distracted, he was so many things wrapped up in one wonderful package. He liked American muscle cars and Motown, had a fondness for light jazz and rock and roll. Being half-Italian, he also had a fondness for good food and good wine, and he was whiz in the kitchen, which had surprised her.

He had played basketball in school and would still occasionally shoot hoops with Lewis and a couple of other guys, though he was just as likely to take in an opera as a sporting event. He was a Yankee fan, but not a rabid one, though he did love to go to the games whenever he could.

Which, she thought as she came back to the present, he was supposed to do that evening. It was already four o'clock and, with tip-off at seven, he was still fiddling with his car and making no move to go in and shower or change out of his torn jeans.

She opened the window then and, as there was no screen at the moment, leaned out to call down to him. "Hey handsome, don't you have somewhere to be tonight?"

At the sound of her voice Bobby turned around and looked up, saw her leaning on the windowsill, smiling down at him. "I did," he called back. "She cancelled on me."

"Did you tell her she was going to miss out on all those hot dogs and Cracker Jacks?"

He laughed. "I don't think Rachel's much on baseball anyway." And then he had a thought. "You wanna go? Hot dogs and Cracker Jacks on me."

It was just the habit of their friendship that had him asking, she knew, but she didn't care. It would be fun and she always liked spending time with him. "Sure. Let me wash this paint off and change my clothes."

"I'll walk over and get you in about an hour," he told her, and when she nodded and then pulled back inside and shut the window, he put the top back up on his car and went inside to shower and change his clothes.

She'd looked so cute with a streak of paint on one cheek and her auburn curls pulled back in a thick tail. "Handsome" she'd called him, and he chuckled as he tossed his phone on the table near the door and headed for the bathroom.

It was that accent of hers that made it sound so nice when she said it. She was forever giving him pet names like that, calling him "honey" and "sugar" and "sweetie". He had long since decided he liked it, even as he wondered if it was such a good idea to like it quite so much.

But then, lately, he'd been thinking of her entirely too much, and in ways that would probably shock her right down to her pretty little feet if she knew.

Her feet. Oh yeah, they were pretty, just like the rest of her. And strong as steel, or at least he thought so. They'd have to be to handle the workouts she gave them when she danced. He'd thought more than once about getting his hands on them and playing with those pretty little toes that she kept painted any number of colors.

That's what had done it, he thought as he stripped off his jeans and t-shirt, turned on the shower. It was seeing her dance last month in the closing performance of the summer season. She'd danced the part of Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, and it had been the first time he had ever seen her perform.

Even thinking about it gave him goosebumps. That tiny, lithe body of hers moved with such grace, and so much emotion, he had found his eyes filled with tears as he watched her and Ivan Petrov perform the passionate pas de deux as Aurora and Prince Phillip.

The emotion her performance had evoked in him was unsettling. More than that, it was scaring him a little. There was something between them, something he couldn't put his finger on, and he was beginning to realize that he wasn't thinking of her as a friend so much as he was now beginning to think of her as a woman. And one that he wanted.

She was a beautiful woman, that was for sure. Her face was a classic oval with fine features, delicately drawn, so that she looked as though she should have been molded in marble. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion and tended to tan easily, though she always wore sunscreen, and there was a tiny smattering of freckles than ran across the bridge of her nose.

A pretty little fairy, he always thought, as she was all of five-two, with shoulder-length auburn curls and blue-green eyes that shifted and shimmered from smoky blue to sea-goddess green, seemingly on a whim. Mermaid eyes, he thought, and had to laugh at himself.

It was hardly fair of him to be thinking of her this way when she had no intention of returning the favor. At least, he didn't think she did. He had never thought to ask her. It wasn't a subject he was eager to broach with her. Maybe because, by virtue of their friendship, they were already close enough for her to have seen his many flaws when it came to relationships. Enough so that she would probably back slowly away and then run like hell if he ever suggested they move beyond what they had now.

Add to that, he wasn't sure if he could handle moving beyond that because he wasn't sure if he could handle how he felt about her. There was much more to his feelings than physical attraction and the ease of companionship. She tugged at his heart in a way that made him nervous. Very nervous.

And that, he thought as he toweled off and then picked up his shaving cream, was just another reason why he could never tell her how he felt. Because he was certain that he was falling in love with her and if he didn't stop it, if he didn't get a handle on his feelings, there was only pain ahead.

Their worlds couldn't have been more different. Emily had grown up in the wealth and privilege of southern society while he had been born into the Italian-Jewish makeup of Canarsie. While she had been taking ballet lessons and learning how to be a lady, he'd been playing ball in the street and learning how to deal with a mother whose behavior was increasingly erratic and a father who either wasn't around, or was drinking himself into a mean temper when he was.

He'd been nine when his mother was diagnosed schizophrenic, eleven when his father decided he'd had enough and walked out on them. He'd learned quickly how to see his mother's episodes coming and did his best to head them off, all the while resenting her for driving his father away. His brother Frank hadn't had it any easier, though their father had at least treated him like he was there. Bobby had always felt like an afterthought in his father's life, and he never understood why.

Frank had spiraled out of control while in college. He had never graduated and had acquired their father's penchant for gambling. Add to that an affinity for drugs, and his brother's life went downhill fast.

He hadn't let his go that way, though. No way. He'd stayed in school, graduated, attended college and joined the Army. His eye for detail and his penchant for investigation he put to use in the CID Unit, but after four years he decided that being so far from home wasn't such a good thing and leaving his grandmother to look after his mother wasn't working out very well. So he hadn't re-enlisted and had come home to enter the police academy, intent on putting his profiling and investigative skills to good use.

He'd had to put his mother in an institution eventually, and it had been hell getting her there at first. She hadn't wanted to go and said she hated it, hated the doctors, hated him. But she wouldn't stay on her medications and his grandmother had gotten too old to keep up with her wild behavior and her hallucinations. Of course, now that she'd been there a few years, his mother was much happier at Carmel Ridge than she had once been. It didn't make the memory of those first few months any easier, but he didn't dwell overmuch on that.

The life Emily had lived, and still did, was eons away from his own.

And then, as he finished shaving and took a good, long look at himself, he realized he wasn't being fair to Emily by thinking that way. True, she had never wanted for anything materially, and her family had stayed together. But she had suffered her share of loss, too.

A car accident had taken her older brother's life when she was fourteen and cancer had claimed her father when she was barely seventeen. Her mother had responded to both tragedies by becoming even more inflexible when it came to Emily, and to her obligations to family and society.

Sabrina Ryan had wanted her daughter to be a proper young lady, a debutante with no aspirations beyond marrying the right man and giving him a family. Emily had wanted to become a ballerina and had no patience for tea parties and fussy society events.

Emily considered her great wealth to be a gift and treated it just that way, which never ceased to touch him when she talked about it. She wasn't pretentious, and never put on airs. If it wasn't for the fact that she could well afford the mortgage and renovations on the brownstone next door, he wouldn't have guessed how wealthy she was.

Her late father's shipping business was one of the largest on the East Coast and her Uncle Patrick ran it now, from the Boston office. He'd met him once when he had been in town to see to a problem in the New York office. A tall, black-haired-blue-eyed Irishman who had left his home in Dublin to see to his older brother's family and take over Ryan Enterprises. Nearly ten years in the States had not dimmed the Irish in his voice one bit and Bobby had noted with some interest that Emily picked up that same lilt when she was around him.

Long ago her father and her uncle had taught Emily and her brother Steven to speak Gaelic. She had taught him a little of it one night when they were sitting out in her garden, and he could at least say "hello", "good-bye", and "a thousand welcomes".

Ceade mile failte. It was the first phrase she'd taught him because it was on her welcome mat and he had wanted to know how to pronounce it correctly.

The sound of the south in her voice was all but covered by the lilt of Irish when she spoke Gaelic. Both were enough to give him pleasant little shivers.

Enough already! He pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a black t-shirt and forced himself to stop thinking about her that way. Then he walked into his living room and his gaze fell on the painting she had given him for his fortieth birthday a few days before, and he knew it was useless.

It was too late to stop it, too late to do anything to save himself from the heartbreak that would certainly come when she met the right guy and rode off into the sunset with him.

Another dancer maybe, someone who could share her life, someone who wouldn't wonder, as he often did, whether or not he was capable of giving her what she needed.

The thought depressed him and the realization that he was falling headlong into love with her clung like a burr, though he tried throwing it off.

By the time he rang her bell a little after five, he had managed to compose himself, though he almost lost his hold on it when she opened the door. She wore denim capris and a purple t-shirt, with her hair pulled back in a clip so that her curls tumbled and danced at the back of her head. Instead of sneakers she wore flip-flops and he smiled to see her toenails painted the same color as her shirt.

With a grin, she handed him her car keys. "Here. . .you drive," she said and watched his face light up. She'd just bought the jewel-blue Mustang convertible a week ago and he'd been drooling over it for days.

"Oh. . .wow." He took the keys from her with a grin as they walked toward the garage where she kept her car.

They rode with the top down and soaked up the late summer sunshine while the radio pumped out a classic tune by Billy Squier. It was the last weekend of August. The following weekend was Labor Day and Emily had the nostalgic feeling of saying good-bye to summer.

What a summer it had been, too. The summer she had fallen in love for the first time since her high school days. To be sure, teenage love was a world away from what she felt for Bobby.

It would have shocked him, she knew, to know that she had visions of marriage and babies in her head when she looked at him. It was only natural to think that way when you were in love, and her Irish Catholic upbringing encouraged it, in any case. And she wasn't a child anymore. She was twenty-eight and longing for the permanence of marriage. Children would come a little later, after she had a few more years of dancing, and then she would retire from full-time performance and teach while she raised her family.

It was a dream she had held since she was a girl and the only man to ever stir her heart at all was Bobby. The pity of it was, he didn't know and likely wouldn't want to. He was gun-shy about relationships, though she knew that with a little love and patience, he could get past that. All he needed, she thought, was someone to love him enough to show him what it was to trust.

True, their backgrounds were very different, and her mother would likely have a stroke when she realized that her daughter wanted to marry a detective instead of a doctor or a wealthy businessman. Her uncle liked him, though, and that counted more in Emily's mind because he was "normal", that was to say that despite the wealth, he had his brother's down-to-earth morals and good sense.

And Bobby had told her once that his mother was forever after him to find a nice Catholic girl and settle down. A lapsed alter boy, he had called himself, and admitted that he did his best to make it to Mass at least a few times a year, but he wasn't a regular attendee. And he was a man who loved his mother, too, despite the illness that made their relationship so difficult sometimes.

She looked over at him as they drove up the expressway toward Yankee Stadium and thought again how handsome he was, and how unbelievably sexy he looked in that black t-shirt and jeans, with wire-rimmed sunglasses on and a smile curving his lips.

Lips she longed to kiss.

Heat flushed her face and she looked away, glad for the music and the wind that covered the sigh that managed to escape.

He bought them both hot dogs and Cracker Jacks, as promised, plus a beer for himself and a Coke for her. They sat in the stands and ate while watching the pre-game antics on the field and Emily nudged Bobby and pointed at the electronic billboard.

"Fireworks after the game," she said, even while she was popping another Cracker Jack into her mouth. "You'll have to tell Rachel what she missed."

"I don't know if I'll see her to tell her that," he answered and took a quick swallow of his beer. "I think she's going out with someone else tonight. That's why she backed out."

"Oh?" Emily tilted her head curiously. "What makes you think that?"

He shrugged. "She's been distracted lately."

This had Emily hooting with laughter and giving him a playful shove. "This from the Absent-Minded Professor!" she chuckled. "She really must be distracted if you noticed it."

"Very funny." He shoved her back, just as playful. "And I'm not absent-minded. I just get busy and forget things."

"Uh-huh." She drank some of her soda and downed another handful of Cracker Jacks. "Mr.-where-did-I-put-my-keys and oops-I-forgot-to-eat-dinner. It's a wonder you don't run out of the house half-naked some days."

"I wouldn't want to make the neighbors jealous," he quipped and she tossed her head back on a laugh.

"Good golly day, how do you fit an ego that size into your head?" she giggled, secretly loving that sexy arrogance that reared itself now and then.

There was another of her expressions that he found endearing and he forgot himself for a moment and hooked his arm around her shoulders. "It's not ego if it's true," he joked.

"You're impossible!" She shoved at him, but he didn't let go right away and she indulged for a moment or two in the feeling of his arm around her and the way it felt to lean against that strong, solid body.

The Yankees took the field then and amidst the shouts and applause of the fans, Bobby managed to pull himself together and put a lid on the feelings that were threatening to spring out everywhere at once.

It wasn't as if this was the first time he had ever touched her, or even put an arm around her, but it was the first time he'd done it with love in his heart, to say nothing of the desire he was becoming all too aware of.

Unaware of what was happening inside of him, Emily got caught up in the start of the game, the noise of the crowd, and the first crack of the bat as Derek Jeter sent the ball flying into the outfield and took off for first base. She'd never been a big fan of baseball, but seeing a live game was way more exciting than any televised game could ever be.

She cheered the Yankees on, loving the energy of the crowd and the way Bobby would lean over and explain the plays to her. He smelled so good; a mixture of Old Spice aftershave and Irish Spring soap, and suddenly she was having trouble keeping her feelings for him under control.

Bobby knew she wasn't deliberately trying to drive him crazy but every time she bounced in her excitement and bumped against him, all he could think about was pulling her into his arms and kissing her breathless. Her scent was like some kind of combination of strawberries and roses and it was making him want to take a bite out of her, starting anywhere.

The Yankees won, six-to-three, and Bobby and Emily shared another box of Cracker Jacks as they waited for the fireworks to start. There was music playing and she was singing along with John Fogerty about the love of the game.

When the first rocket went up and exploded in a shower of deep blue, Emily gave a cry of delight and barely managed to stop herself from clapping her hands. She'd always loved fireworks. When she was young, before Steven had died, her father had taken them to the beach every July Fourth and let them light off their own fireworks after they watched the big, professional display over Charleston Harbor.

Thinking of it now had her tearing up and she smiled up at the light-filled sky and thought of her father and her brother up there, maybe taking a peek now and then to see how she was doing.

Bobby laid his arm around her again, leaned over to get a better look at what he thought were tears running down her face. "Emily? You okay?"

She nodded, forgetting herself, and relaxed against him, turned her head onto his shoulder. "I was just remembering summers when I was a kid," she told him. "Daddy used to take Steven and I out to the beach to watch the fireworks in the harbor on July Fourth, and then we would set off our own. We had all kinds of stuff, like bottle rockets and whistlers, and Roman candles."

He rubbed his hand slowly up and down her arm. "If I'd known fireworks would make you weepy, I'd've brought my handkerchief." He usually kept one in his pocket and she loved to tease him about it.

"Guess I'll have to use your shirt," she said and managed a laugh even though her breath was beginning to catch in her throat because his hand was still stroking her arm.

She knew he had no idea what it was doing to her to be close to him, in fact, to be nestled against his side with her head resting on his shoulder.

Another rocket went up and turned the sky brilliant with light as it exploded into a multi-colored shower in the shape of a dragon. The ooh's and aah's of the crowd became gasps and then cheers each time a new shape appeared and Emily sat with her head on Bobby's shoulder and watched each display with a growing desire to tell him how she felt about him. She couldn't do that, she knew, without risking their friendship and sending him quick, fast, and in-a-hurry in the other direction.

So she kept her feelings to herself even as he kept his arm comfortably around her and pointed at the next shower of light.

"Look, Em." Laughing now, and just as caught up in the moment as she, he didn't think about what he was about to say. "That's you."

It was Tinkerbelle, her wand held high and her wings spread wide. She laughed, too, and then nudged him with her elbow. "Oh, a fairy is it?" she asked, slipping into an Irish brogue. "And are you after thinking I'll put a spell on you, then?"

She already had, he thought as he turned a playful grin on her. "Maybe."

"And here I was thinking you were too practical to believe in fairies and magic."

"Of course I believe in magic." And with a quick motion he slid his hand behind her ear and brought it back with a Cracker Jack held between two of his fingers.

Delighted with the sleight of hand, she laughed out loud and took it from him, popped it into her mouth. "How do you do that?"

"Uh-uh." He shook his head. "A magician never gives away his secrets."

Oh, he was clever, she thought. And so sweet. Imagine, likening her to Tinkerbelle! Giddy as a schoolgirl, that's what she was, and she couldn't help herself.

When he walked her to her door that night, it was all she could do to keep from throwing her arms around him, but she kept it light and held her emotions in check. Even so, she went to the window to watch him walk next door and when she went to bed, she didn't fall asleep for a very long time.

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Bobby couldn't sleep either. He'd walked inside, tossed his keys and his wallet on the table, then collapsed into his leather armchair with a wistful sigh. His eyes fell again on the painting Emily had given him for his birthday.

[size="3"]A street scene she had done herself, modeled after a story he had once told her, about the day he and some of his friends had been playing baseball in the street when they were kids. She had painted the buildings and the cars, even the storefronts, to look as they would have in the late sixties. A group of young boys played ball in the street while three men sat on the sidewalk in front of the barber shop, watching them.

It was as detailed and lifelike as anything he had ever seen. The day she'd given it to him, he had actually had to fight back the urge to cry. Even now, as he sat looking at it, he felt the sting of tears, the ache of the lump in his throat.

She had given him something made by her own hands, from the picture she held in her mind of the story he had told her. No one in his life had ever cared enough to do something so special for him.

There was so much in her, he thought as he got up and went down the short hall to his bedroom. She had dreams and plans, wishes and wants, and one day she was going to fall in love with someone and off she would go.

The idea of that depressed him, so he didn't dwell on it. Instead, he closed his eyes and pictured what she would be doing right now. Getting ready for bed, probably, and drinking her nightly cup of tea.

He pictured her home, thought of her there, curled up on the sofa, with her feet tucked beneath her, a cup of tea at her elbow and a book in her hand.

She had a love for antiques and her decorating taste ran the gamut from beach cottage to English manor home. He'd had a quick peek into her bedroom once, when she had been showing him her handiwork with restoring the moldings around the doorways upstairs.

A study in romance, it was dominated by a huge antique cherry sleigh bed. The bureau and night tables were new, but stained the same rich color as the bed, and there was a matching armoire that housed a TV with doors that she kept closed when she wasn't watching it.

The fabrics were fine, their colors bold and rich. Silk drapes, the color of merlot, a fluffy comforter covered in a pattern of dark red swirling vines against a champagne background. She had a mass of pillows on the bed as well, and they gave it a wonderfully inviting look.

So inviting, in fact, that at the moment he was imagining what it would be like to have her in his arms, her body wrapped around him in that big bed, nestled against all those pillows and comfortably cuddled beneath the softness of her sheets.

Because the very thought of it made him want, he pushed it out of his mind and went to the spare bedroom he used as an office. He had to be in court on Monday to testify in case he had worked on a couple of months back and he sat down and focused on his notes from the investigation until he was satisfied that he could close his eyes without thinking of Emily.

It almost worked.




*Stay tuned - more to come*

This is incredible! Is this posted at ff.net? You have painted an absolutely fascinating picture of Emily and Bobby...and have me aching for them each to find out how the other one feels. I'm hooked!

You have an amazing talent for descriptions...both of people and things....and I am SO jealous! More please!

I agree with ciaddict, I'm loving this too (waits patiently for the next chapter).

All blushes here! Thanks for the compliments! I will have it posted at FF.net soon, after my waiting period is over, since my account is new. I'm tweaking Chapter 2 and will have it posted here in a bit. If I have time tonight, I'll try and get Ch. 3 up, too.

*Note* Chapter 2 gets a little sexy, which is why I've rated the story M. Well, that along with the fact that dealing with the subject of 9/11 is pretty emotional and raw, too. My stuff is geared toward an adult female audience (if I had to describe it) and so there's always lots of emotion and romance. My favorite authors include Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, Luanne Rice, Dorothea Benton Frank, and Anne Rivers Siddons. I like to experiment with different things, too, and I'm noodling another fic, with a late S2 Bobby involved with another of my southern sirens, and that one involves an old house that's rumored to be haunted.

Okay, Ch. 2 is finally ready! Lyrics to Dreams by The Cranberries are courtesy of one of the many Internet sites that posts song lyrics to those of us who desperately love singing along, even if we would get voted off American Idol.

*Fair warning* It gets very sexy toward the end of this one...

And it looks like it is too long for one post, so I will split it in two.

What Matters Most

Chapter 2

Over the next week, Emily didn't see much of Bobby at all. He had to be in court for a couple of days and then he was working on two new cases with his partner, Alexandra Eames, whom Emily had met once when she had gone into Manhattan to meet Bobby for lunch.

No taller than Emily, Alex had that tough demeanor that female cops could so easily adopt and still be feminine. She had strawberry blond hair that swung just at her shoulders and a pretty face that had lit with curiosity when she first saw Emily. Of course, Bobby had explained that she was his friend and that she lived next door to him, but she knew that, being female, Alex was examining their friendship for clues that it was more than that.

Even then, Emily had been wishfully thinking that she wanted it to be more. Now she was just focused on reining in her girlish imagination.

Her dance company was taking a six week break from regular rehearsals, but they would begin again in earnest on the first of October. There was still teaching to do, and the students had recitals and so forth, so there was still work to be done now and then. She worked out at home every day to keep herself in shape and her muscles limber, and now and then she met Ivan at the studio so they could practice together and keep their timing in sync. Some of the others were doing freelance projects with other companies, as their contracts allowed, and touring as well.

As a girl of eighteen, during her first year at Juilliard, she had found out quickly that the world of dancing could breed rabid jealousy. She herself had never struggled with that jealousy. She was doing what she loved, and when she was recognized for it, she was happy. When others were recognized, she was happy for them as well. She had never been able to understand the ones who weren't.

It had been Madame Galina who had finally given her an answer one day when she had found her choking back tears after a vicious verbal attack by Carina, another dancer in the corps who was angry that Emily had been promoted to soloist ahead of her.

"There are those who are talented," Madame had said gently. "And there are those who are truly gifted. You are the latter, Carina is the former. She will always hate you for that. You must not let it get to you. You love the dance and when you dance, that love shows. That is what I want you to remember."

Emily had never forgotten that talk, and the firm, but gentle way Madame had handled her hurt feelings. Madame had a unique ability to dig down into the heart of a person and pull out their strengths. So she had gently reached through the softness of Emily's romantic, and easily bruised heart, and found the Lowcountry steel beneath.

For that, Emily was eternally grateful.

It was that steel that had allowed her to deflect and ignore that same vicious envy last year, when she was promoted to principal dancer. She had few friends among the other girls in the corps, though she was friendly enough with a couple of the soloists. Over the last few months, she and Carrie Sanderson, one of the other female principals, had been spending more time together and she felt like she was finally developing a real friendship there. She really liked Carrie and, as neither of them was quite the diva that some of the others were, they got along well.

If the other girls were sometimes distant, the male dancers certainly liked her. Theirs was a world fraught with melodrama and casual affairs, neither of which she had any desire for. They all seemed to want to get her into bed. Even Ivan, her semi-permanent partner, had tried now and again, but she had politely brushed him off.

Maybe she was old fashioned, and still a virgin at twenty-eight, because she just couldn't do the quick, superficial tryst thing. Sex was more than physical in her mind and she wasn't in the way of giving herself to a man just because she wanted physically, or he did. If there was no love between them, no promise of something more, then she didn't want it. She had no intention of having a wild fling with any man, much less another dancer.

Dancers were temperamental, and she was no different. She was passionate about her dancing, about her art, and about life in general. She had seen enough explosions between others in the company to know that she didn't want to marry a dancer. And of course, now that she had met Bobby, she didn't want anyone but him.

But that was neither here nor there.

With a sigh, she turned from the window where she had been staring out, waiting for his car to drive up, and forced herself to stop watching for him like a lovesick schoolgirl. A glance at the calendar on her kitchen wall reminded her that she had somewhere to go that night and the prospect of seeing her cousin Rory cheered her up considerably.

He and his band, The Drovers, were playing at Noonan's Pub in the East Village. Rory Sullivan was a fine hand with a fiddle, even if she was inclined to be biased because he was her cousin.

They would play reels and ballads, probably take requests as well. They played traditional Irish music, as well as the more modern rock-inspired music. And Rory would probably ask her to sing with him, which she loved to do whenever she could. She enjoyed the singing, but she was more looking forward to the dancing. A night of music at an Irish pub, even an Irish-American one, was all about the dancing.

With a lighter heart and a bounce in her step, she took a Coke out of the fridge and went back upstairs to put the finishing touches on the walls in the corner bedroom, determined that she absolutely would not keep stopping to watch for Bobby's car to pull up next door.

Maybe.





He'd had a rotten week, and today just topped it off perfectly. It had been a day filled with uncooperative witnesses and busted leads. Alex was nearly as frustrated as he was and by the time they quit it was nearing six o'clock and he wearily drove through the Monday evening traffic, wanting nothing more than to get a shower and wash off the grime of the day.

Rachel had called him, after all, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to see her again. He'd done his best to give her a polite brush off, but even so, she'd been pissed off and then hung up on him.

It was just as well, he decided, because he had grown tired of the emptiness of their relationship. He had no desire to see her again, nor did he have any desire to sleep with her again.

In fact, he had no desire for any woman at all except Emily. He'd been missing her the last few days. His workload had been keeping him so busy he'd hardly had time for more than a quick hello now and again, when he caught sight of her working in the garden or coming and going from her house.

He had been up doing research some nights until the wee hours of the morning and had seen her lights on next door more than once. Late night painting maybe, he had mused, either walls or canvas. You never knew with Em. Or she could be sanding, or spackling, or restoring molding.

She was a regular Bob Vila, only much prettier.

He wondered sometimes what she did when she wasn't painting, or working on the house, now that the dance company was taking a break and she wasn't at the studio every day. It had seemed to him that he was her only real friend and he wondered about that. He knew there were plenty of other women in her ballet company, but she wasn't given to spending much time with many of them, other than Carrie, whom he had met once when she had come to see the house.

She did have lunch now and then with a few people from church after Mass on Sundays, but he didn't think there was anyone she was close to other than her uncle in Boston, and him, of course. She had plenty of family on her father's side, but they were mostly scattered around Ireland, and back in South Carolina there was her mother and stepfather.

Her old school chums, she had once told him, were all married with kids now. She was the odd one out. The one who had followed her dreams to New York and become the dancer she had always wanted to be. She had throngs of adoring fans in the ballet circles, but few real friends, and it bothered him to think of that.

He pulled into the yard behind his apartment house and looked up at the window of the room he knew she had been working on lately. It was the same one she had been in when she'd leaned out the window and called out to him the day of the Yankees game.

And ever since that day, he hadn't been able to get her out of his mind.

It was scaring the hell out of him at the moment because he couldn't imagine living without her. And not living without her not only meant telling her the truth about his feelings, it also meant making some kind of commitment to her. Like marriage.

The very thought of it made him feel alternately wishful and afraid. He sure hadn't had the greatest example as a kid, watching his father cat around with other women before he finally just left his family behind to be a playboy-scholar-gambler-extraordinaire full-time.

He himself had never been unfaithful. Once his word was given, he held to it. When he dated a woman, he didn't set down any rules until the relationship became intimate. If there was sex involved, he asked for clarification to be sure whether or not she wanted exclusivity at that point. And if they both agreed to that, he never wavered from it. It was a matter of honoring his word.

Of course, with Emily, there was also the little matter of her family, or more specifically, her mother. He knew enough about Sabrina Ryan to know it was her wish that her daughter should be with someone with the wealth and status to match her own, and he sure as hell didn't fit that image. Not that Emily cared.

More than once he'd heard her on the phone with her mother, exasperated, trying to be patient while she was being lectured about this or that. More often than not, she'd hang up the phone and toss it to the floor in a fit of temper; something he found irresistibly cute.

She was a terror, alright. All five-two, one-hundred-five pounds of her.

Beautiful, that's what she was, with a sassy streak that peeked out now and again, and a temper worthy of her Irish blood.

As if his thoughts had conjured her, she appeared in the window, darkly silhouetted against the glow of the setting sun. He got out of the car, tried to pretend he didn't know she was there. Still, he couldn't help glancing up again, and when he did, she was gone.

Thirty seconds later, her back door opened and she was there, waving at him. He stood still, rooted to the spot as she crossed the tiny yard and leaned on the fence.

"Hey stranger. Long time, no see."

"Yeah," was all he could manage as his heart gave a quick leap and then fell at her feet.

Emily mistook the look on his face for the usual distraction of mind that happened when his brain was still at work even though his body was at home. The stubble on his face was a couple of days old and she knew he'd been working long hours lately.

He looked tired and a little irritated, and then she found herself thinking how sexy he was with that bit of shadow along his jawline and his shirt open at the top, the collar of his white undershirt just peeking out. His tie was sticking out of his jacket pocket and he had the leather notebook he always carried to work clutched in one hand.

"Long day, huh?" she asked, wondering where his mind was and why he was suddenly staring at her as if he'd never seen her before.

"What? Oh. . .yeah." He shook himself, tried to snap out of the haze. "We've had two cases to deal with this week and neither of them are going well." Without thinking, he reached out to run his fingertip over the smudge of pale blue paint on her cheek. "Are you painting that corner room blue, or did you start a new canvas?"

Her cheek tingled where he'd touched her and she had to steady her voice before she answered him. "Today it's walls. Maybe tomorrow I can play with my other paints." She plucked at her paint-stained t-shirt and grinned. "I've got to clean up now anyway. My cousin's band is playing at Noonan's tonight."

"Your cousin?" He thought back, tried to remember if she'd mentioned him before. "Your Uncle Patrick's son?"

"No, that's Daniel. He's the one who owns the horse farm in Waterford County. This is Rory. He's a Sullivan, not a Ryan. His band is called The Drovers. They're doing a pub tour to promote their newest release." She sent him a smile even as her heart was beginning to trip and tumble. "You want to come along? I can promise you a good time. They're a lively bunch."

"Sure. What time?"

He agreed much too quickly for his own comfort but there was nothing he could do to stop the flood of emotion that was pouring from his heart. With a wave and a smile she'd cut him wide open and now he was stumbling along, not sure if he even wanted to stop the rush of his feelings, even as they threatened to drown him.

"They're going on at nine. That gives us both just enough time to shower and change clothes." At his lopsided grin she laughed. "Okay. . .okay. . .it gives me enough time to shower and change. Not everyone can take ten minute showers and then be dressed and ready to leave in another fifteen. I have to dry my hair, put on makeup. . ."

He crooked a finger and chucked her under the chin as she trailed off. "Go on then," he said lightly. "Do your girl thing and I'll come and get you in an hour or so. You want me to drive?"

"I was going to take a cab," she said and managed not to stutter while her stomach did a backflip. "I'm planning to have a pint or two of Guinness tonight and dance my feet right off."

"I doubt your feet will be any worse for wear," he teased her. "I've seen you dance, remember?"

Indeed he had, too, but not the way she danced that night. The pub was crowded and The Drovers were a fan favorite, judging from the applause and the many shouted requests.

He sat at the small table they had taken near the dance floor and watched her swing through the crowd, her sandal-clad feet a blur and her face lit with a smile as she danced her way through a couple of reels before she came back to take a swallow of her Guinness and then grab his hand.

"Come on," she said. "Your turn."

And though he was a good dancer under normal circumstances, he wasn't sure he had the knack for what she'd just been doing. "I don't know how to do that."

"Nothing to it." She was feeling so alive, so filled with the music, and with love for him. It made her reckless and she tugged playfully on his hands. "Come on. I'll show you."

How could he resist her?

He stood up, let her lead him through the crowd until she found a space for them, and when he slid his arm around her, took her hand in his, she smiled up at him.

"The secret is not to think about your feet," she said. "Just listen to the music and go with it."

"Easy for you to say." But he had watched the other dancers long enough to get the general idea and he found the rollicking rhythm infectious.

Before he realized it, they were whirling around the floor together and he felt like he'd been dancing with her all his life. She was laughing up at him, her eyes catching his and holding for a long moment before he twirled her away and then back again.

They danced until the band took a short break, and they were barely to their table when a tall, rangy-looking young man with black hair and laughing blue eyes swept Emily right off her feet into a wild hug as he swung her in a circle.

"Well, now, there's a pretty lass I've not seen in far too long." Rory set his cousin on her feet and bent to kiss both her cheeks. "I've been watching you dance, love. Every man in the place is wanting to sweep you up, I'll wager."

"Go on with you!" Emily laughed at him and ruffled his hair. She introduced him to Bobby as they sat down and asked the waitress for three more pints. "How's the tour going?" she asked.

"Even better than the last," Rory answered. "The new album is selling near as fast as can be pressed. It's all these Americans, getting in touch with their Irish roots."

"Admit it, honey, people just plain love the music of Ireland, no matter where they're from." Affectionately, she leaned to kiss his cheek. "So how are things across the pond? I hear Daniel and Lily are expecting a baby."

"Aye. And from the sound of things, you'd think Lily was the first woman to ever conceive."

"Daniel's just pleased as punch about being a father. What's the pool?"

"Oh, about fifty-fifty as to whether a boy or girl." Rory sipped at the Guinness the pretty waitress handed him and gave her a wink and a light pat on the bottom.

"Lord, Rory, you're the biggest flirt I know," Emily laughed.

"Ha!" He looked at Bobby and grinned. "Don't let her fool you, boy-o. She'll be after flirting with you soon enough."

Emily went crimson from the neck up, gave Rory a playful shove. "It's not like that."

Intrigued by that blush, and wondering what had prompted it, Bobby leaned over and gave her a teasing nudge. "Like what?"

"Oh! You!" Her heart was skidding around in her chest now and she swatted at his arm. "Don't encourage him."

Rory grinned at his cousin. He knew her well enough to see the look in her eyes and know that she wanted it to be "like that". Wisely, he kept that thought to himself. No sense embarrassing her, especially since he didn't know the situation. Although, the way that big, handsome Yank was looking at her, he'd lay odds that Emily didn't yet realize that her friend was in the way of wanting something more, too.

"So, when do you go back into rehearsals?" he asked.

"October first." Her face was still hot and it took some doing to keep her voice steady. Bobby was still leaning in close to her and as he reached for his beer, his arm brushed against hers and sent her stomach into a kicky little dance.

"We're performing Swan Lake this fall," she went on, trying to focus. "And of course, The Nutcracker during the Christmas season."

"It's not Christmas without The Nutcracker," Bobby put in. "Will you be dancing the part of Clara?"

Emily nodded, glanced at him and watched the light of mischief spring into his eyes. "What?"

"Nothing." With his tongue tucked into his cheek, he grinned at her. "I was just thinking that you'd make a cute Sugar Plum Fairy."

"Here we go with the fairy bit again." She elbowed him gently as Rory gave a hoot of laughter.

"Oh, but she is, isn't she?" He grinned over at Bobby. "A fine little sprite is our Emily… Ow!" he exclaimed as she jabbed him with her elbow. "Sure and that's a fine thing. You didn't jab him like that for saying the very same."

"That's because he doesn't know any better yet."

Bobby was about to say something when another young man, this one only a couple of inches taller than Emily with a mane of rich chestnut hair, stopped at the table and bent to tug on one of her curls.

"Emily, love, how've you been?" Shawn Riley leaned comfortably over the chair and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

"Shawn!" Emily turned and reached back to hug him. "I'm doing just fine. Y'all blew me away tonight. The new material is wonderful."

"Just wait," he said with a grin and a nod. "Gets better still. Are you going to sing with us tonight?"

Sing? Bobby cocked his head and stared at her, surprised when she nodded.

"I've been looking forward to it all night." She reached up and tweaked Shawn's chin playfully, as a sister might. "I've just been waiting for one of you to ask."

"Well, consider yourself asked then," Rory told her. "We'll do a song or two with you after the break."

"Speaking of breaks…" Shawn glanced at his watch. "Ours is just about up."

Rory drained the last of his Guinness and stood up, flashed a brilliant smile back at Emily and Bobby. "A couple of simple tunes," he said, directing this at Bobby. "Then you're in for a treat. Emily's a voice like an angel."

When Shawn and Rory left them, Bobby looked over at Emily and found her face still flushed with that rosy color. "So…you sing with them?"

"Now and then, when they come to town. Or when I'm over in Ireland. There's a pub in Ardmore, the village closest to Daniel's farm, and there's always music of some kind. Sometimes it's just Rory and his fiddle, and maybe someone with a concertina. Feet start tapping and before long, half the place is singing along, or dancing."

"Now that sounds like fun," he said and reached to tuck a curl behind her ear. "I've had a rotten day. Thanks for the invite. I needed this."

She kept her smile in place as her heart rolled over in her chest. "You get too buried in your work sometimes. Somebody has to pull your head above the surface now and then."

He gave a small laugh. "You applying for the job?"

"Maybe." She couldn't stop the grin. "I already know what to expect. I've seen plenty of your moods."

"Moods?" That really made him laugh. "This is you, telling me about moods?"

"I never said I didn't have any, now did I?" she said primly.

Oh, but he wanted to kiss her! The way she lifted her chin, set her mouth, had him wanting to just lean over and plant one on her.

"Don't get your wings in a twist, Tinkerbelle," he chuckled and earned a jab in the side from her elbow. He tweaked her chin, watched her eyes darken and go as deeply blue-green as the sea. "You know I'm kidding."

"Half-kidding," she answered and couldn't stop the smile. "I told you dancers are temperamental."

"So are artists." He trailed his finger down her nose. "You're both. That's a double-whammy."

Was he actually flirting with her? With her heart perilously close to her throat, she drank more of her Guinness and tried to compose herself before she turned back to look at him again.

Rory called out to her then, motioned for her to join them, and she stood up, felt Bobby's eyes on her as she headed for the tiny stage where the band was set up. She drank some water to clear her throat and waited a moment while Shawn handed her a microphone.

"We'll do 'The Last Rose of Summer'," Rory said. "And then 'She Moved Thru' The Fair'."

Emily nodded her assent and waited while they tuned up. And when she began to sing, just as she did when she danced, she lost herself in the beauty of the music and the simple joy of song.

Bobby simply stared at her as she sang so beautifully of love, and of loss. Her voice was a soft soprano and flowed from her as fluidly as water.

After three or four songs, Emily turned to Rory and, thinking of Bobby, said, "Let's do 'Dreams'."

"Ah. . .The Cranberries," he said with a grin and a nod. "Another of your favorites."

Rory set aside his fiddle and picked up a guitar, nodded at the others, and as the intro began, Emily looked out into the smoky haze of the pub and locked eyes with Bobby.

Very nearly mesmerized, he watched her as she began to sway to the rhythm of the song. He recognized it as the one used in commercials that beckoned you to "come and see the beauty of Ireland". And as she began to sing, she never took her eyes from his.

All my life
Is changing everyday
In every possible way
And all my dreams
It's never quite as it seems
Never quite as it seems
I know I've felt like this before
But now I'm feeling it even more
Because it came from you
And then I open up and see
The person falling here is me
A different way to be
(Lalalaah lalalah lalalaah la la la) I want more (impossible to ignore)
(impossible to ignore)
And they'll come true (impossible not to do)
(impossible not to do)
And now I tell you openly
You have my heart so don't hurt me
You're what I couldn't find
A totally amazing mind
So understanding and so kind
You're everything to me All my life
Is changing everyday
In every possible way
And all my dreams
It's never quite as it seems
Because you're a dream to me (a dream to me)

He couldn't move, could hardly breathe while she sang those words. Was she singing them to him? Or was it just that he wanted her to be? And as she lifted her hand, swayed with the music, he knew it was over for him. There was no fighting how he felt, no going back. He was completely, hopelessly in love with her.

It was nearly two in the morning when they finally said good-bye to Rory and the others and climbed into a cab. Bobby gave the driver the address and then settled back in the seat beside Emily.

"You knocked me out tonight, Em."

"Why?" She turned to glance at him as the cab pulled away from the curb.

"I didn't know you could sing like that. It was amazing. Have you ever thought of doing it professionally?"
She shook her head. "I really do love to sing, but I've never wanted to make a career out of it. Dancing's my first love. That's where my heart is."

"That last one. . .I really liked it. I never heard the whole song before, just pieces of it during the commercials they use it for."

"I've got the CD at home, if you want to borrow it and give it a listen. Sometimes The Cranberries are a little political, but then there's hardly an Irish band that isn't. Comes from having their land stolen out from under them and being ruled over with an iron fist."

The passion in her voice had him turning to look at her. "Boy, you are Irish," he grinned.

"Down to the bone, as Daddy used to say. What a misfortune for my mother." She gave an insolent chuckle and felt her head swim hazily. She'd had three pints, after all. Any wonder she was a little fuzzy. "Poor Mama," she went on. "All she wanted was a little southern lady she could dress up in satin and chiffon. Instead, she got a Lowcountry wildcat with a classic Irish stubborn streak."

"Wildcat?" That made him laugh. "That's a picture. I always think of you more like a firecracker."

"What?" Now it was her turn to laugh as she turned a dubious grin on him. "A firecracker?"

"Yeah. Perfectly harmless until the fuse is lit. Then…look out!"

She slapped at him playfully and giggled at his description of her. "Holy cow," she wheezed as she laughed. "You're exactly right!"

The cab pulled up in front of her house then and Bobby paid the driver, got out and then held out a hand for Emily, walked her up to her door. The streetlights were bouncing their glow off her eyes and he stood for a moment looking into them, wondering what to do about her.

How was he supposed to handle being in love with her?

"You want to come in and get that CD?" Unaware of the tumult of his emotions, Emily was unlocking her door and already thinking of having her tea and going to bed.

"What?" He came out of the fog and realized what she had just asked him. "Oh. Yeah – okay."

He followed her inside and she dropped her purse on the hall table, toed off her sandals, and headed for the kitchen. "The CD's in the cabinet," she said. "You want some tea? I've got mint-flavored decaf I can brew."

"Yeah. . .sure." He moved into the living room, went to the stereo cabinet and looked for the CD. Once he found it, he slid the it out of its slot, laid it on the hall table and then went down the hall to the kitchen just in time to see her boost herself up onto the counter as she tried to reach the box of teabags high in the cupboard.

"You never heard of a stepladder?" he asked and stepped over to reach up and take down the box for her.

"My way's faster," she answered and he laughed.

"You definitely do things your own way. One of your more endearing traits."

Because he was reaching up and over her, and because she was sitting on the countertop, her face was nearly level with his. Impulsively, she leaned in and planted a playful kiss on his chin. "Chivalry's one of yours."

He froze, the box of teabags clutched in his hand. For the moment, his breath seemed to have left him. Slowly, he lowered his arm, set the box on the counter, and looked into her eyes.

Shifting colors again, now they were smoky blue, with a ring of gold near the pupils, and they were beginning to widen a little with what looked like wonder. He lifted his hands, framed her face with them and held her gaze for what seemed like a long, long moment before he slowly, slowly lowered his mouth onto hers.

The soft heat of his mouth startled her nearly as much as the kiss itself. She had imagined kissing him more than once, and each time it had been full of heat and hunger. She had never dreamed that his lips would be so soft, or that they would brush over hers with the kind of tenderness that could spur an ache in the heart.

The tiny purr of pleasure that escaped her throat was no less surprising to her and before she realized what she was doing, her arms had lifted to hook around his neck, her fingers sliding upward to tangle in the richness of his hair.

More. It was all he could think. Just more.

He cupped her head and tilted it back, teased her lips apart with his tongue and slid into her like silk. The candy-coated taste of her stole through him like a drug and he heard something like the rush of a mighty wind in his head. He deepened the kiss, took more of her, and felt the heat of desire rising within him like a tidal wave.

Her hands were in his hair and she moaned softly, long and deep, when his tongue slid lazily over her bottom lip, then dipped into her mouth to tease hers. Every nerve in her body was alive, even if her brain was spinning and her thoughts were jumbled.

Closer. She wanted him closer.

Those slender dancer's legs wrapped around his waist with surprising strength and he closed his arms around her and lost himself in the kiss as he stroked her back, felt her skin warming beneath the silk of her blouse. He trailed his lips over her jaw, down her throat, greedy now for more of her. And now back again to her mouth. That wonderful, soft, sweet mouth.

He wanted her. More than he had ever wanted anyone. Ever.

He didn't stop to think about the terrific consequences if they gave into the moment. He simply lifted her off the counter and into his arms, groaning softly as her legs closed around him more tightly and all those sweet little curves fitted against him like a second skin.

Emily felt her blood running like a river of lava through her veins as the hot, liquid tugs in her belly became a throbbing ache and spread downward. What was happening inside of her was nothing short of amazing. She could hardly breathe through the sensations, the haze of desire that was building within her.

She caught his bottom lip in her teeth and felt him shudder even as he moved away from the counter and headed down the hallway with her. She was plastered against him, her tongue exploring, playing, seeking, and she could hardly get her breath, but then she didn't need it. Not when he was giving her his.

There was hardly a thought left in her head. She couldn't think, didn't want to think. She was melting. Absolutely melting. She could feel it; feel her bones just sizzling apart and turning into tiny little puddles of gold inside of her.

The house was mostly dark but for the tiny nightlight she kept in the upstairs hall, but he didn't need a light to show the way. He carried her up the stairs, turned right and headed for her bedroom. He knew where the bed was and the moment he reached it, he eased her down, laid her back against her pillows, just as he had imagined doing.

He wanted to feel her, to taste her. To touch her, take her. There wasn't anything he wanted more in this moment than to be inside of her. The need to take was clawing at him, equally so was the need to give. Through it all was the overwhelming power of the love that had grown in his heart when he wasn't looking.

He'd never taken a woman in love. Never loved anyone the way he loved Emily.

With his mouth fused to hers, he slowly drew her blouse from the waist of her jeans and began to unbutton it.
She was so lovely. Wonderfully toned from dancing, but with the softest of curves, and then he had her blouse open, the front clasp of her bra unhooked. Small, firm breasts that were now quivering as he cupped them gently, filled his palms with the softness of them as he eased his mouth over hers and swallowed her tiny gasp of pleasure as he brushed his thumbs over her nipples.

Down, down, to trail his tongue along her throat, over her collarbone, then lower until he caught her breast into his mouth and heard the breath explode from her chest. Her tiny cry of surprise and delight only stirred his blood that much more.

Drowning. She was drowning. Her body was on fire. She wanted something, but she didn't know what. She couldn't think through the haze in her mind, couldn't imagine that she could bear that throbbing ache much longer.

She never saw Bobby tugging off his shirt, hardly knew what was happening as her own hands slid over his bare chest, her fingers dancing through the fine, soft hair, and then her arms were circling his neck, holding on as his mouth covered hers once more.

The ache was too big, too vast. Her heart hammered in her chest as she greedily took his mouth, felt the heat of his skin against hers. His hands were warm on her skin, those long fingers skimming slowly down her sides, sliding over her belly. She never felt him unfastening her jeans, never noticed when he slid them off.

Her arms were wrapped around him, her mouth fastened hungrily on his, and all she could think was that she needed some kind of relief from that burning, throbbing ache. She trembled and sighed, nearly delirious with the attack of sensation her body was experiencing. Her mind was a haze of need, her body a stoked furnace.

She was moaning, her breath hitching, as he slid her panties down. He looked at her for a moment in the dimness of the light from the hall and knew he would never love anyone but her. Her eyes were closed and her body was arching toward his, craving the release, and he wanted her more than he had ever thought he could.

"Emily. . ." Her name came out on a ragged whisper as he moved over her, his hands sliding over her hips. He rubbed his lips over hers, drew her breath out on a long sigh. "I need you," he moaned. "I need you so much."

Too late, Emily realized just what she was allowing him to do. Even as she throbbed and burned for his touch, she knew she had allowed things to get much too far out of control.

It was his voice that had brought her around and now she lifted her hands, started to press them against his chest to ease him back, and then his hand slid slowly down her belly and his fingers dipped right into the center of that hot, throbbing ache.

She was searing hot where he cupped her, and wet. It took barely the stroke of his fingers against that soft flesh to have her body jerking against his and then pouring out to him.

The release of it, the stunning, golden blow of it, had her hands falling limply back as she cried out with the wonder of it. She felt a warm, wet gush as her body shuddered with the velvet shock of the first orgasm of her life.

Oh, it was lovely, she thought as his mouth covered hers once more. So lovely to have that ache released, that need answered.

And it was all wrong. Because she was in love with him and he just needed a physical release. There could be such pleasure here, but there would be no heart. How could she give herself for the first time to a man she loved when he didn't love her back?

She felt the beginning of tears as she pressed her hands against his chest once more.

"Please," she cried softly. "I can't…" Now she did push him back. "I can't…"

Through the haze of his own desire, he looked at her face in the shifting half-light and saw the glitter of tears. The realization that he'd made her cry hit him like a sucker punch, and then right on the heels of that, without her saying a word, he understood something else.

Silently cursing himself for being so stupidly greedy, he leaned over her and brushed at the tears that just kept falling and falling. "Emily. . .God. . .I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Know?" Her breath hitched and she felt helpless and vulnerable lying there with her shirt open and her bra undone, her body completely bare below the waist.

"That you're a virgin." He stroked her curls, damp with perspiration, brushed them back from her face. "I shouldn't have pushed you along that way. I'm sorry."

"But if I wasn't, then you wouldn't be?" she asked as the sobs began to break free. "You'd so easily go to bed with me without any thought to what might happen after?"

"After?"

He blinked; once, twice. He'd nearly taken her innocence without giving her the benefit of truly making the choice with a clear head. But how was he to know she was so inexperienced when she'd responded to his touch that way, and with so much fiery passion?

"Yes, after." Humiliated now, and angry, she shoved him away from her and hooked her bra, yanked her shirt closed and began to button it. "What was the plan, Bobby? Take a tumble with me and then go whistling on your merry way? Or were you thinking you could slip over here whenever the mood took you?"

"Damn it, Emily, it isn't like that." She was making it sound so casually callous, and it wasn't. It wasn't!

Without bothering to fish around for her panties, she snatched up her jeans and yanked them on, then stood up and faced him, both barrels blazing. "Then just what exactly is it like?" she snapped. "You can't play around with me like that. It's not fair."

"I wasn't playing…I'm not."

"What would you call it then?" Hot tears were coursing down her cheeks and her temper was flaring. He had simply wanted sex and she was in love with him. So the field was already uneven.

"I…Emily…" He lifted his hands, helplessly let them fall. How did he explain it without making a fool out of himself? "I'm sorry," he said again. "I shouldn't have let things go so far."

"You're damn right!" she shouted at him. "I'm supposed to be your best friend, not your latest conquest!"

It was a knife through his heart. Hurt, he pulled his shirt back on, sat there staring at her. "Is that what you think of me? That I'm some kind of playboy? That I don't care who I sleep with?"

"I…Bobby, that's not what I said." Somehow her meaning had gotten lost in her temper. One look at his face told her she had really wounded him.

"But it's what you meant, isn't it?" He stood up, his legs shaking so that he wondered if he would be able to walk away from her with any dignity at all. "Is it?"

"No." Oh…she had hurt him. "Bobby…."

"No." He held up his hands. "Forget it."

He started to push past her but she reached for his hands. "Wait…please…"

He pulled away from her. He couldn't bear to look into her eyes now. "Don't," he said. "Just don't."

Did she really think he would use her like that? Did she?

Blinking hard, he turned sharply away from her and stalked from the room, his heart breaking into tiny little chunks of pain that felt like shards of glass in his chest. Long, angry strides took him down the steps while his mind became a blur of painful thoughts and colliding emotions.

She followed him down the stairs, stood in the foyer and watched him button his shirt, slide his feet into his shoes. "Don't go," she said softly. "Please…I think...Bobby, I need to explain something…"

His hand was on the door. All he had to do was turn the knob and escape with some shred of his pride. And then he heard her weeping.

It was that which turned him back, that which broke his heart in still more pieces. Worse than the fact that she thought he would use her for sex, was the fact that she was crying. She wasn't a woman who used tears as a weapon, and those tears were his fault. He'd managed to bruise her heart, though he wasn't sure how.

He went to her now, cupped her face and gently brushed at her tears. "Emily…oh God…don't cry." He drew her into his arms and held her close. "Please don't cry."

"You're wrong," she sobbed and wrapped her arms around him, clung tight. "I don't think of you like that…I mean…like you said…"

"I'm sorry," he said again, surprised when she drew away and reached up to frame his face with those small, delicate hands.

"I've never thought that about you," she said fiercely. "Never." She stroked his cheeks with tender hands, her heart in pieces at their feet. "Don't ever think that I would."

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and wondered where they went from here. "I'm sorry, Emily," he said after a moment. "I crossed a line with you that I should never have gone near."

There were more tears now as she realized what all of this meant. It was going to be over for them. How could they be friends after this? The easy camaraderie wouldn't be there. And she couldn't go back to just being his friend. Not now. Not when the taste of him would stay with her, and the memory of his touch would be forever burned into her flesh.

So, then, what did she have to lose by telling him how she felt about him? It couldn't make things any worse than they already were. And maybe it would take some of the sting from his heart if he understood why she had been so lost in what had been happening between them.

"I let you cross it," she countered. "It's as much my fault as it is yours. And I've never told you how I feel about it. I just…I can't do the casual thing, Bobby. It's just not who I am."

He shook his head slowly. "Damn…Emily…I feel like a jerk." He reached up to take her hands in his, wishing he knew what to do, what to say. "At the very least, I should've stopped to ask you if you wanted to go in that direction to begin with."

"I do," she admitted. "Eventually."

"Just not with me."

She shook her head at that, tugged him into the living room and nudged him gently onto the sofa. She knelt in front of him, took his hands as she looked up into his face; the face she loved.

"Wrong again," she said tenderly. "I very much want it to be with you."

He blinked, stared at her. "You do?"

She nodded slowly, her heart in her eyes. And then, with six softly spoken words, she put it into his hands. "I'm in love with you, Bobby."

Unsure if he'd heard her correctly, he gripped her hands and stared at her for a full ten seconds before he could even speak. "You are?" he finally managed to choke out.

She nodded. "From the moment I met you."

"Emily…" His throat was closing on him. The realization that she felt the same way he did staggered him. How had he missed it?

"I didn't tell you that so you'd say it back. I just…I needed to say it, Bobby. I wanted you to know, so you would understand that I got caught up in the moment because I want so much to be with you. But…it's okay that you don't love me back."

"Oh, Emily." He pulled her up so that he could get his arms around her, tug her gently onto his lap. "But I do," he said softly as he cradled her head on his shoulder, stroked a hand over her hair. "I do love you."

Her heart gave a joyful leap at his words, and then spun around in her chest. She slid her arms around his neck with a quiet sigh and held on; just held on. "If I'd known it would go so well, I'd have told you before," she murmured. "Please tell me I'm not dreaming."

"You're not dreaming." He gathered her closer and pressed his lips to her brow. "Since we met, huh?"

"The very day." She turned her face into his neck and nuzzled. "It was your smile," she decided. "I'm a sucker for your smile."

He laughed softly. "I hate to say it, but I think you're right about me."

"Oh?"

"Yeah." He rested his cheek against her hair. "I must be distracted to have been so clueless."

"See? Now there's another thing I love about you," she teased. "Your ability to admit when I'm right."

"Oh…I see." He poked her in the ribs and had her giggling. "And what about the fact that you were just as clueless about how I felt?"

"You're a cop," she said simply. "You're much better at tucking your feelings away than I'll ever be. I'm an open book."

"A lot of good it did. And now you're saying I can't read either!"

Emily lifted her head to look at him, her eyes twinkling. "Maybe I should become a book on CD instead."

He tossed his head back on a laugh and hugged her tighter. "It might be helpful," he chuckled.

Content to finally be in his arms, she snuggled in and laid her head on his shoulder again. "I've been wanting to do this for so long."

"Have you?" he asked, his voice thickened by sudden emotion.

"Mmhmm…." She brushed her fingers over the back of his neck, toyed with the ends of his hair. "I wished for this very moment on every evening star."

His heart melted into a warm puddle. "There's your romantic Irish heart," he murmured, stroking his hand down her back and putting a tiny kiss on her temple. "Any wonder I'm in love with you."

It was her turn to melt now. "Tell me again," she whispered.

He crooked a finger beneath her chin and lifted her mouth to his. "I've never loved anyone the way I love you."

"Oh." Her eyes misted and she touched her lips to his once more. "You'll have to mop me off the floor any minute now."

"You matter to me. No one's ever mattered, Em. Not like this." He lifted his fingers to touch her face. "It was that last song," he said softly. "That's what pushed me over the edge. I sat there thinking you were singing those words to me…and I…I wanted you to be."

"I was." She kissed him again, feather soft. "I sang it just for you."

"That's going to be our song, you know," he told her, with that smile she loved so much.

Emily smiled back and rested her cheek against his. "It always was."

AAAAH! Where is it? ::looks around:: Where is the rest of the story? The intense sexy stuff....maybe even LOVE MAKING between Bobby and Emily?

I'm hopelessly in love with Bobby and Emily, btw! SOOOOO thankful to ciaddict for sending me an email and telling me you had posted this! Thank you, ciaddict! Thank you!

So. Where. Is. It? You promised you'd post it in 2 parts.......

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!!!!

************************

Um, uh, I just looked up a bit, right after I posted it.....and there it is.......so, um, uh, nevermind about the rant, just enjoy the rave, okay?

Right. I'm gonna go read the next part now....::slinks of embarrassed::

You could just stop it right there, and I'd die happy! Seriously! No need to put them through any trouble at all; just end it right there...oh, have him propose, that would really seal it for me!

I'm not so sure now that I want you to take S2 Bobby and give him a different love interest. I really like Emily. I'd like to see you take them through all the seasons and up to the present. See them grow and change with every case; get married; have children; deal together with Nicole, Declan, Jo; Alex as his work partner; having kids.....all that. I think you'd do a great job with it.

I'm ready for more!

This is SO good! Thanks for 'taking the plunge' and sharing it with us! LOVE IT!!!!

LOL! You are quite welcome. I'm really encouraged by the positive feedback I've received so far.

This one is going to get really serious in the next two chapters because I set it in the time period just before 9/11. I'm not sure how far I'm going to take them...usually I just go and go until it seems a good place to stop. Oh, but they are surely going to end up hitched! The goal of any good romance is to have a marriage happen.

I have thought about doing serials, and going back to a finished story later to pick up where I left off, but that requires me to get to the "end" of one, which I haven't done yet. LOL!

I'm going to post Ch 3 tomorrow, most likely, because it's getting late and I'm still trying to figure out Fanfiction.net. LOL! Why can't these sites all be Microsoft Word compatible? Geez!

Glad you're enjoying it!

Oh my....lovely, just lovely. Of course I'm going to have to take a cold shower before I go to bed, but oh well. Can't wait for chapter 3.

And you're welcome FM! I thought you would like this one!

I read this earlier but had to login to comment
Another great chapter, the second half was definitely hot. Reading the end though made me feel all warm and fuzzy *^__^* Great job!

I'm so glad you finally decided to publish some of your ff. I haven't gotten around to this one yet (had to work all day), but I had a sneak preview at the first lines and when you started to describe another one of those Southern girlies, I knew I'd love this, too!

Okay, y'all. Chapter 3 is ready. The events of 9/11 are dealt with here, I hope realistically. I did a plethora of research when I wrote this, to the point that my eyes were crossing from reading all the accounts and such. I've changed names and added others in the interest of keeping it real without stepping on anyone's actual "reality". I'll probably have to post this one in two parts, too, because it's so long.

Now I'm off to proof Chapter 4 and get started on Chapter 5 (which is mostly still in my head at the moment!)





"Good golly day," Emily exclaimed as she hit yet another layer of wallpaper. "How many layers of this stuff are under here?"

Bobby grinned at the expression, checked his own progress. "I've counted four. Considering the house was built in the 1870's, there might be a few more."

"They never heard of taking down the old before slathering on the new?" Blowing a stray curl from her forehead, she went back to work scoring off the wallpaper. "This is all the more reason why I'm painting. I wouldn't wish this on anyone who might buy this house in the future."

"By the time you're done, you'll have doubled your investment."

"That's the idea."

He glanced over at her, looking so casual and pretty in her faded denim shorts and white t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a clip and her feet clad in flip-flops. He smiled down at her toenails, which were currently painted an eye-popping shade of hot pink. All that soft, girlish beauty and the brain of a businesswoman. He found the combination irresistible.

"You like doing this yourself, don't you?"

He could see it all over her face, even while she furrowed her brow at the amount of paper still layered on the walls. They were in the room on the third floor that she was planning to turn into a home dance studio. Some previous owner had already done the hard part of knocking out a wall to make two average sized rooms into one very large, and very long, one. They just hadn't done anything else with it.

She was nodding now, still concentrating on peeling back the strip of paper hanging halfway down the wall. "Yeah, I do. It's a lot of work, but it'll be worth it in the end."

He watched her tug at the brittle paper, then simply tear the loose part of it off and start again. Determination. Well, that was a part of her, and so were the other three D's she had once told him about, which were essential for a dancer – drive, desire, and discipline. He had seen her exemplify all four on more than one occasion.

In the days since they had confessed their feelings for each other, he'd fallen even deeper into love with her. The past few days had been a kind of awakening for him, albeit a nerve-wracking one. He really was beginning to think he couldn't live without her.

Okay, technically he could live without her, but he wouldn't be whole without her. That was the part that scared him. He had always thought he had his life figured out. That maybe one day he'd find someone he could make a life with, have children with, but those had been abstract ideals. Things he had never had to think very hard about. The past few days with Emily had him thinking about them in much more tangible terms, and it was scaring him.

Maybe scare was the wrong word. Terrifying fit much better.

He'd been examining his feelings all week and trying to figure out what it was that made him so uneasy. Commitment? Not really. At least, he didn't think so. More to the point, it was the idea that pledging his life to her meant opening himself all the way.

Emily wasn't a woman who would take only part of him. She'd want everything. In order to give her that, he would have to unlock some doors and give her entrance into all the other parts of his heart, his life. Along with that came the risk that she would take one good, long look and run the other way.

Then there was the little matter of her knowledge of his relationship woes. They'd been close friends long enough for her to have the inside scoop on him already. It should have soothed him to know she loved him anyway, but instead he was hashing it out in his head, wondering if she had ever really examined those flaws of his objectively, or if she had always seen them through the rose-colored haze of her feelings for him.

He tended to have a one-track mind sometimes and more than one relationship had fizzled out because he just wasn't all the way there. His body could be in one place while his mind was in a dozen others.

Still, Emily was oddly patient in some ways, which always struck him funny because in so many others she was a barely controlled tempest of emotion and movement. She rocketed through life with a passion, and her moods were legion. Her love of dancing was complete and total, and she approached everything she did with that same verve.

Even now, with one wall nearly finished and piles of old, dried up wallpaper littering the floor, she was bouncing to the beat of the rock music that played from the radio she had perched on a chair in the far corner. She started on a new section, sliding the flat of her putty knife beneath the edge and then working it loose with her fingers.

He turned back to the piece he was working on, peeled it back as best he could and tossed it onto the growing pile. A couple of weeks ago, he never would have thought he would be spending a Saturday tearing down old wallpaper and enjoying it so much. Of course, it was working on it with Emily that was so enjoyable. She sang along with every song she knew as she rocked to the rhythm and tapped her feet. She was the only person he knew who could turn such a tedious chore into a party.

"The previous owners didn't get very far with this place," he commented as he slid his own putty knife beneath the next edge. "At least they finished the ground floor."

"They did do a lovely job on the kitchen and the living room, though why they chose that hideously modern dome light for the dining room, I'll never know." Emily shook her head. "You never saw that thing, but it was awful. That coffered ceiling down there just begs for a beautiful chandelier and they had this post-modern glass and chrome thing hanging in there. Blech!"

He laughed, gave a quick tug on the stubborn paper in his hands and felt it give way. "You're going to have mirrors installed in here, right?"

"On that wall." She gestured toward the longest wall, directly across from the windows that overlooked the back garden. "I'll have a barrè attached to it, and these floors refinished and coated with polyurethane. They're going to take a beating."

"You'll be pretty busy with rehearsals again soon. Are you thinking you'll need to hire someone to finish things off?"

"Maybe." She thought about that for a moment. "Whatever I don't get finished in here by the end of this month, I'll probably hire out, only because I want to have it ready as soon as possible so I can use it for home workouts. The other rooms I can take my time with."

"I could probably help you get these walls finished." He swallowed once, twice. "And the – well the floors wouldn't be that hard to do." Commitment. "An electric sander will have them smoothed down pretty quick. You'll have to hire someone for the mirrors and the barrè, though. I've ever done anything like that before."

Absorbed in tugging on the last piece of the yellowed paper left on her section of the wall, Emily nodded absently. "That'd be helpful," she said and then glanced over at him. "You sure you'll have time for that?"

He nodded. "I'll make time for it."

That stopped her, had her turning all the way around to face him. "That sounds rather serious," she said lightly.

"Well…there is a catch you know." He stepped toward her, drew her into his arms. "I only work for food."

With a laugh, she swatted at him even as he pulled her closer. Her dreams had blended with reality and the resulting giddiness made her feel like a schoolgirl, finding love for the first time. And then his lips were on hers and whatever thoughts had been in her head simply slid away.

The high-pitched chirping of her cordless phone interrupted them and she thought about just letting it ring.

"You going to get that?" Bobby asked, even as he kept kissing her.

"Maybe." She rubbed her lips over his with a small sigh as the phone kept up its insistent chirping. "Hold that thought." And then she went to the chair and turned down the radio, answered the phone. "Hello?"

"Emily, I'm sorry to call you on a Saturday, but I need to reschedule our meeting." It was Jim McMillan, the Chief Operating Officer of her family's company and head of the New York office. "There's a scheduling conflict with some other meetings in Boston for Tuesday the eighteenth, so we're moving the quarterly meeting up to this Tuesday, the eleventh. Will that work for you?"

"Sure. No problem." She smiled into the phone. "Is Uncle Paddy making it to this one, or do I have to go to Boston and make an appointment to see him?"

Jim gave a small laugh. "He's going to be in Dublin for the next two weeks," he told her. "A labor dispute at the yard."

"Oh, that sounds like loads of fun," she joked. "I've been a slacker and haven't talked to him this week. I didn't realize the Dublin yard was having problems."

"It wasn't. It just cropped up a couple of days ago. A couple of the guys got to talking and the next thing you know there's a mutiny."

"It's always something," Emily said with a smile as Bobby stepped up behind her and slid his arms around her waist. "I'll see you on Tuesday morning, then. Is it still scheduled for eight-thirty?"

"Yes. Eight-thirty in Conference Room A, on ninety-one."

"Got it. I'll see you then."

Bobby was nuzzling at her neck now and she set the phone aside, turned to wind her arms around him. "That was Jim McMillan. They've rescheduled the quarterly meeting for this Tuesday."

He liked that she took such an interest in her family's business even though she didn't actually work inside the company. "So you'll have a morning filled with bar graphs and pie charts."

"Something like that." She smiled up at him. "It's boring, but I think it's important to keep up with how business is going and what changes might be happening."

"Not exactly what your mother has in mind when she reminds you about your 'family obligations', huh?"

"Boy, you got her pegged and you've only met her once." She gave a small laugh as she let go of him to turn the music back up. "She never paid much attention to what was happening in the business. That was Daddy's domain, as far as she was concerned."

She considered that thoughtfully as she walked back to the wall to once again begin tugging at the stripped paper. "If Steven hadn't been killed, he would have gone to work in the company, too. He was already taking business courses, even in high school."

"You still miss him, don't you?" It was an emotion he could identify with, though his brother wasn't dead. At least, he hoped not. Sometimes he wondered if Frank got mugged or wound up lying in a gutter somewhere if he would even find out about it.

"I do." Though it didn't sting as it once had, but instead left her feeling wistful about all of the things they had never gotten a chance to say to each other, or do together. "I'll always miss him. There's a part of me that went with him, I suppose, because we were so close, even though he was three years older than me."

He nodded, thinking back to his own childhood. He'd been close with Frank once, when they were small boys. That had come to an end somewhere around the time their mother had started having the first of her erratic episodes. Schizophrenia was a foreign word to him back then and his mother's fits had frightened him badly.

Their father hadn't handled things well, either, and more often than not it was Frank who was on the receiving end of the worst of his temper, though he'd had his share of it, too, now and then. Many times because he got in the way.

To be fair to his mother, it wasn't her fault when she lost control. Though he hadn't understood what was wrong with her at the time, he could look back now and feel for the tormented woman she had been before, and even after, the diagnosis and the medication.

"Wow…where you'd go off to?" Emily was saying and he realized she was standing beside him, tapping her fingers on his arm.

"What?" He looked at her. "Sorry…my mind was wandering."

"Oh. Well…nothing unusual about that."

"Funny." He gave her a playful push. "What were you saying?"

"I was asking you if you wanted to order something from Sal's."

"Sure." He put his arms around her waist, tugged her closer. "You didn't have to ask, though. You know what I like."

"So does that mean you'd like veal parmesan again, or do you want to go wild and have eggplant instead?"

"Oh, you're cute. Really cute," he added as he lowered his head to brush his mouth against hers. "You pick."

"Mmmm…" She lifted her arms, circled his neck. "Whenever you do that, my bones start to melt."

He shifted the angle of the kiss, deepened it, and sighed with the sweetness of it. "Forget dinner," he murmured. "I'd rather spend the night kissing you instead."

Her romantic heart sighed and she gave a soft laugh. "So how about we order a pizza and pop in a movie we've already seen?" she asked.

"Deal," he said, and sealed it with a kiss.

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On Tuesday morning, Emily was up with the dawn to shower and dress for the meeting. She always loved going to the New York office of Ryan Enterprises, as it was located on the ninetieth and ninety-first floors of World Trade Center One, which offered a gorgeous, panoramic view of the city and the harbor, depending on which side of the building you were on.

She chose tailored black slacks and a lilac colored cashmere sweater, pulled her hair back in a tortoise shell clip, then slid her feet into simple black flats. The meeting wasn't overly formal so she knew that the slacks and sweater versus a suit were okay and she glanced at the weather for the day as she poured her second cup of coffee into a travel cup and waited for Bobby.

She was driving them both into the city and he rang her bell promptly at seven-fifteen. She opened the door for him with a smile and flung her arms around him the moment he stepped inside.

"Missed you," she said and rested her cheek against his suit jacket.

"It's only been ten hours." He folded his arms around her and breathed her in. "Mmmm…you smell good."

"My newest favorite from Bath & Body Works, jasmine vanilla."

"A one-two punch if there ever was one." He moved to kiss her lightly. "You ready?"

"Yep. I just need my purse and my coffee. Do you want some?"

"Yeah, coffee would be good."

He followed her back to the kitchen, took down another travel cup. She was double-checking the locks on the back door and he stood looking at her for a moment, framed by those sun-washed windows. All those pretty tones in her hair were glinting in the morning light and he went to put his arms around her and pull her close.

For reasons he couldn't explain, he felt a deeply intense need to hold onto her. Emily felt the strength of his emotions and angled her head back a little to look up at him.

"Are you okay?"

He nodded, lifted his hand to stroke her cheek. "I was just thinking how beautiful you look, standing here with the sun shining on you."

"Oh." She sniffled. "Don't you dare make me cry. I'll smear my mascara."

He dabbed at the corner of her eye with his fingertip. "Well, we can't have that."







It was a beautiful September morning as they drove into Manhattan in her Mustang with the top down. School buses passed by filled with shouting children and Emily smiled and waved at two little boys who were pressed against the back windows of one of them, pointing at her car and mouthing the word "cool".

Traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge was busy enough to turn a ten-minute drive into twenty, but it didn't matter. She still had plenty of time to get down to the Trade Center before the meeting started.

"You want to have lunch later?" she asked as she turned onto Park Row and pulled up in front of One Police Plaza.

"Sure. Unless we get called out. I'll call and let you know if that happens." He leaned over to kiss her and was once again overtaken by the need to hold onto her. He had a morbid sense of foreboding that he didn't understand. "Emily…"

"What is it?" She could feel the emotion that suddenly vibrated through him.

"I…nothing, I guess." He shrugged it off, but then moved to kiss her again and found himself lingering over it, trailing his fingers along her jaw. "I love you, Emily," he said softly.

She smiled, felt the words settling in her heart. "I'll never get tired of hearing you say that," she murmured and kissed him once more. "I love you, too."

He got out then, sent her one last wave before she drove away, and had the oddest sensation. He couldn't put a name to it and he shook it off, turning around to find Alex standing about ten feet away.

For her part, Alex Eames was attempting to close her mouth after coming upon him locking lips with his pretty friend in a convertible Mustang. Apparently he and Emily were more than friends these days.

"Well…this is a new development," she said as they started across the plaza. "When did you and Emily move beyond 'just friends'?"

"About a week ago." He grinned at her. "Now you're going to tell me you saw it coming."

"Well…" She shook her head on a laugh. "The first time I met her, it was pretty obvious how she felt about you."

"Well you could've said something," he joked as they got into the elevator. "Since I was completely clueless."

"No way. You don't tell a guy when you see a woman look at him like that unless you know for sure she wants him to know it. Since I only met her once, I couldn't make a fair call."

"What's that? Some kind of silent sisterhood rule?"

"Something like that," she said and laughed as the elevator doors opened and they headed into the squad room.

They had no open cases at the moment, only paperwork to finish on the last one, and he sat down at his desk, opened his notebook, and once more shook off the odd feeling of heaviness that still lingered.





Emily parked her car in the garage beneath the towers and took the elevator to the lobby, where she caught the express elevator to the ninety-first floor. It was just before eight-thirty and when she walked into the conference room, most of the others were already there.

Jim came to greet her with a fatherly hug; a tall, lanky man with a mane of black hair that was streaked with gray at the temples. "Good morning, Emily," he said. "You're looking especially pretty today."

"Thank you." She smiled up into green eyes that always reminded her of a cat's. "And may I say you're looking pretty fine yourself. Marriage is agreeing with you."

"Two years and still on our honeymoon," he grinned. "Speaking of which, Melinda sends her love. She's already pestering me about the season tickets for this year. Thinks I'll forget to secure them."

"Tell her she's in for a treat. We're doing her favorite this fall."

"Ah. . .Swan Lake. She'll be happy to hear that."

Emily moved to the long table in the back to make herself a fresh cup of coffee and then they all gathered around the conference table as Jim's right hand man, Charles LeBlanc, began with a quick overview of the first quarter earnings and profit margins.

She glanced around at the familiar faces of the people who were very nearly like family to her after so many years. Charles had been "Uncle Charlie" since she was a teenager, and Marty Williams had come on just after her father died, taking over as the head comptroller so that Charles could move into the position of Chief Financial Officer.

Then there was Andrew Markham, their marketing director, and Holly Concannon, the manager of their accounting department. Mandy Malone was the newest face, having just come on the year before as Holly's assistant.

Emily double-checked her phone to make sure the ringer was turned off and saw she had a text message from Bobby. Hiding her phone in her lap so as not to disturb Charles while he was talking, she flipped open her phone and pressed the key to bring it up.

Lunch @ 12:30. See you then. I love you.

Smiling, she quickly texted him back. Can't wait. Luv U 2.

She glanced at the time as she closed her phone. Eight-forty-three. She'd be out of the meeting by ten at the latest and would have time to stop in at the mall downstairs and do a little shopping.

It was only moments later that it sounded like the sky was falling in on them.

There was a thunderous roar, coupled with an odd high-pitched whine, like a jet engine, and the entire building seemed to shake as though struck by an earthquake.

The sound was hideous and pieces of the ceiling began to fall as Emily screamed and dived beneath the table, as did everyone else. For a stretch of time that seemed much longer than it actually was, no one said anything. There was just the sound of ceiling tiles and light bulbs falling, and what sounded like water rushing behind the walls. Out in the hallways, there was the sound of people shouting and screaming.

The only thing she could think was that it had sounded like a bomb going off, except for that odd whining sound just before the last explosion. She thought of the bombing eight years before, but that had been a truck bomb in the parking garage. This explosion had come from above.

Still, who'd be able to bomb them from the air without warning? This wasn't 1941. Terrorists couldn't just fly into their air space and attack them with bombers. Air Force and Navy bombers would have long been in the air at the first hint that anything was approaching.

Even as she thought this, the first lick of fear began to tickle in her throat as she listened to the continued slap of ceiling tiles hitting the floor and the top of the conference table. She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer.





At eight-forty-three Bobby was smiling down at the text message from Emily. He walked to the fax machine, grabbed the paperwork he was waiting for, and thought for a moment how slow the morning seemed to be moving.

Moments later there was a shout from somewhere in the hallway and he dropped the faxes on his desk, turned a curious glance on Alex.

"What's that about?" he asked, putting his hand on his gun even as he said it.

But it was only Detective Ritchie, now standing in the doorway of the squad room, his face dead white and his eyes wide. "Something just hit the Trade Center," he said. "Tower One's on fire."

Bobby felt as if the floor had dropped away and left him suspended in mid-air. "What?....What?"

"Tower One," Ritchie repeated. "There was an explosion. I saw it. I was just…man, I was standing down the hall at the window and it just exploded…there's freaking fire everywhere on the top floors!"

Oh God! Emily! Ryan Enterprises' offices were in Tower One.

With his heart pounding in his throat and a growing sense of fear clawing at his belly, he raced down the hall at a dead run, nearly slammed into the windowsill as he reached it and skidded to a stop.

Ritchie was right. A good chunk of the top three quarters of Tower One was now engulfed in flames. Someone tuned the wall-mounted TV near the elevators to MSNBC and now there were shouts of the first sketchy reports that were coming in.

A plane, they said, had hit the northeast side of Tower One. Most likely by accident, they said, but Bobby knew better. The day was beautiful, the sky crystal clear. There was no way that a pilot would fly into that tower by accident on such a clear day. It had to be a terrorist attack. There was no other explanation.

His heart hammered painfully beneath his ribs as he pulled out his phone and dialed Emily's number, silently begging her to answer.



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Jim was the first to poke his head out and take a look.

"It's okay," he said, working to keep his voice steady. "Ceiling tiles are down, lights are damaged, but it looks safe enough to come out. Just watch out for the bulbs on the floor and the wires that are hanging down."

"What the hell happened?" This came from Charles as he helped Mandy out from under the table.

Emily crawled carefully into the open and then stood up slowly. "It sounded like an explosion. Like a bomb…" And then she trailed off as she saw the smoke filtering in beneath the door. "Oh my God…Jim…look."

"Smoke." This seemed a redundant thing to say, but the word popped out anyway as he moved to the door and felt it. "It's not hot," he said, then eased it open. The corridor was hazy but he couldn't see where the smoke was coming from. He closed the door. "Maybe there was an electrical explosion of some kind."

Jim took off his jacket and laid it against the bottom of the door and Emily stared at him, wondering if they were going to be trapped so very high up in a building that was on fire.

"Shouldn't we try to get out of here?" she asked.

Jim nodded. "We will, as soon as we assess the situation." He nodded at Charles. "Call nine-one-one," he said. "I'm going to check out the exits. We'll have to use the stairs." He turned, took Emily gently by the shoulders. "Put my jacket back against the door and don't come out until I get back and give the all-clear. Understand?"

She nodded, did as he told her, and then went to comfort Mandy, who was quietly shaking in the corner of the room.

Holly and Marty were both on their cell phones, assuring their families that they were okay and asking for information about what was going on. Andrew was swearing at his phone because he couldn't get a signal and then he grabbed the one from the conference table, surprised to find it was still working.

Emily gave Mandy a reassuring hug and then went to grab her purse and take out her phone. Bobby had already tried to call her six times. It was eight-fifty-five when she dialed his cell phone number, nearly sobbing with relief when she heard his voice.

"Emily! Thank God!" Bobby answered his phone while he stood at the end of the hall, one hand on the window as though he could reach out and touch her by the sheer force of will. "Where are you? Are you okay?"

"In the conference room," she told him. "There was this huge explosion that shook the building something fierce, like an earthquake. We can't see anything from where we are and the hallways are filling up with smoke. Jim went out to scout the exits."

"Emily…what…" Stay calm, he told himself and steadied his voice. "What floor are you on?"

"Ninety-one." She was trying to stay calm herself, but the smoke was beginning to snake in around the many jackets now stuffed at the bottom of the door. "We're…we were just getting started when there was this huge roar and the building shook. We're okay…but the hallway is filling up with smoke. We have jackets pushed against the door in here, and parts of the ceiling fell in, and some of the light bulbs and stuff. There are wires hanging everywhere. And I think…" She stopped, took another steadying breath. "I think we're going to have to come all the way down the stairs."

"Emily, they're saying it was a plane that hit the building," Bobby said and fought to keep his voice even as he began to put two-and-two together and understand the way he'd been feeling all morning. "Some kind of jet."

"So that's what I heard then…" Her voice trailed off as she remembered that whining sound.

He started to ask her what she'd heard when someone behind him gave a shout.

"Holy crap!" Jeffries this time. "What the hell is going on here?"

Everyone at the windows saw that dark little dot on the horizon getting closer and closer, and it suddenly became clear that there was another jet headed for the towers.

"What the hell is that?" Charles said suddenly, pointing out the window. "What's that idiot doing?"

Emily looked out the window just in time to see another plane – a jumbo jet – headed for the other tower. "Oh my God! It's another one! Headed for the other tower!"

"Oh, God, Emily…" Bobby's heart was lodged in his throat. "I see it… Damn it! I see it…"

He could only watch helplessly as the plane veered directly toward the tower, the phone clutched in his hand, as the others clustered in the hallway gasped in unison. Someone shouted, "It's going to hit!" just as the plane crashed into Trade Center Two and literally disappeared into the bowels of the building as plumes of fire and smoke blew out on all sides.

From her vantage point on the southwest corner of Tower One, Emily saw the approach of the plane. It was a few floors lower than where she was and it all but disappeared from view mere seconds before Tower Two erupted into flames as the plane apparently plowed into it.

Fear was a living breathing monster now, ripping at her belly, tearing at her lungs, as the force of the blast from the other building blew the windows out in the conference room and sent her screaming to the floor.

"Emily!" Bobby could hear nothing but people screaming and shouting on the other end. "Emily!"

After a moment, there was a choked reply. "I'm here."

He heard the tears in her voice and all he wanted at that moment was the power to transport himself right through the phone and scoop her up, get her out of there. "Are you okay? What happened?"

"The windows," she gasped. "The other plane…it must have hit on the far side of the other tower. I didn't see it hit, just the explosion on the other side. It blew out the windows. Glass…there's glass everywhere. And paper flying. Paper is just flying everywhere out there." The tears were clogging her throat, streaming down her face, and she knew without a doubt that they were under attack. There was no way that second plane hit by accident.

"What did it look like from there? What kind of plane?"

"A jet. It was a jet. A big one. 747 or bigger. It disappeared right into the building, like it got swallowed up. Oh God, Bobby…what's happening?"

"I don't know, baby," he answered. "I don't know."

She got up, careful of the glass on the floor. Her hands were shaking, her legs felt like rubber, and she could taste the burn of her own fear. "What if there are more of them out there? They're trying to kill us all!"

"Emily…" Bobby struggled to keep his voice steady. "It's okay. Just get to the stairs. Don't try to use the elevators, okay? Just go to the stairs and start down. You need to get out of there now."

At that moment, Jim burst through the doors, a haze of smoke spilling into the room with him. "Fire department's already on their way up," he told them. "The stairways are clear enough that we can get down. The elevators are a no go. The blast took them all out. We're not waiting," he added. "Let's go."

"Okay…we're going to the stairs," Emily said into the phone. "Jim says the fire department's on the way. The stairways are okay, as far as he knows." Even as she talked she was picking up her purse, slipping the strap over her head to wear it cross-body, trying to focus her mind. "How are you seeing this? Are you outside?"

"At the end of the hall on our floor." He rubbed his fingers over his eyes. "I'm at the windows. But it's all over the TV. God, Emily, the whole world saw that second plane hit on live TV."

The keen edge of fear was slicing her to ribbons inside but she held onto herself and headed for the doorway, grabbing the wet paper towels that Charles was handing her even as she told Bobby what she was seeing.

"There's smoke everywhere up here, and the ceiling is damaged in some places, but not in others, and…" She stopped, her voice trailing off as she looked at the destruction that lay ahead.

"Emily? What is it?"

"This must be the side where the plane hit," she said finally as her voice shook. "There's debris everywhere, like the ceiling and the walls just crumbled. Some of the windows are broken out on this side, too. It's so smoky on this side…it's hard to breathe. And the elevators…Oh, God…Bobby, the doors…the elevator doors are blown out. It's like someone punched a fist right through the middle of them and they're just hanging open. I can't…I can hardly tell you what this looks like. It's awful, Bobby."

The terror in her voice slid right through the phone and settled into his gut, twisted there. "Just…keep going. Don't stop, no matter what. You hear me, Em? Just go."

She nodded, though he couldn't see her, and continued to tell him what she saw as she stumbled along behind Jim and the others as the smoke grew thicker.

There was a putrid stench in the air. The smell of burning plastic and wood and paper, the carpeting, the paint melting from the walls, plus an underlying scent that smelled like car exhaust. Carbon monoxide, she thought. Good lord, what are we breathing in here?

The eerie silence was broken only by the sound of people quietly encouraging each other as they moved quickly toward the stairs. Surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of panic just now. Everyone was just moving along in groups, following one another as closely as possible.

And then a shriek went up from somewhere very near her. "They're jumping!" a woman screamed. "Oh my God! They're jumping from the windows upstairs!"

Bobby could hear the shouting, but not the words. "Emily, what's happening?"

She stopped at the doorway of an office where two young women were huddled, clutching each other and sobbing near the shattered window. She stepped closer, careful not to get too close, even as Jim was calling out to her and Bobby was asking what was happening.

She didn't understand what the two women were talking about and then she heard a scream above her and two people, hands clasped, sailed past the open window. Her breath caught and she felt as though she'd lost all her air as she listened to their long, wailing cries echoing back as they plummeted over ninety stories to their deaths.

"Oh…oh no…" She began to cry again as she simply stood there, staring through the jagged teeth of that shattered window. "Bobby…those people…they're trapped above us. They're jumping out the windows. They're jumping, Bobby…oh, God…oh sweet God…"

"I know, baby. I see them." His throat snapped shut as he realized those tiny dark forms falling toward the ground were people. They were people!

He rested his forehead against the hand he still had pressed to the window. "There's nothing you can do about it, baby. Just keep going. Get to the stairs and get down. It's all you can do."

One of the young women in the room was sobbing uncontrollably about not being able to get in touch with her husband. "He doesn't even know I'm okay," she cried. "Can I use your phone? Please!"

Emily nodded, swiped at her tears. "Bobby, I need to hang up. I need…there's someone here that needs my phone. She wants to call her husband…"

"Let her," he said. "And then get the hell out of there. You hear me?"

"I will." She motioned for the two women to follow her and found Jim just outside in the hallway, talking on his own cell phone as he ushered people toward Stairway C. "We're headed for Stairway C right now. I'll come up there as soon as I get out of here, okay?"

His heart was heavy at the thought of her having to come down all those stairs. It was a long, long way from the ninety-first floor down to the concourse that led to the street. "Emily…call me as soon as you get outside."

"I will. . .I love you. . .I just. . .whatever happens. . ."

"Don't say things like that." He felt the first prickling of panic and clamped down hard on it. "You're going to be fine. Just keep going down and don't stop."

The hall near the stairs was crowded with people heading for the only exit and Emily moved quickly along with them. "I really love you, Bobby," she said.

"I love you, too, Em," he said, heedless of the others who were gathered there. He didn't care if the whole world heard him, as long as she did. He felt the beginning of tears and blinked hard. "I'll see you in a minute."

She didn't say good-bye. She couldn't. She simply ended the call and then handed her phone to the young woman beside her.

"Call your husband," she said gently.

It was coming through the crowd now. They were going into emergency protocol. The building was being locked down and secured, no one would be allowed in without proper identification and all visitors were going to be stopped at the door and patted down before being allowed entry.

Alex stood beside Bobby, chanced laying her hand on his arm. "She's below the impact zone?" she asked.

"Yeah." He still had his phone clutched in one hand. That phone…it was his lifeline to Emily. "Her father's family owns Ryan Enterprises. Their offices are in Tower One." He took a breath, tried to stop staring out the window at the burning towers, but found he couldn't tear his eyes away. "She's on ninety-one, on her way down the stairs now."

"Alright everybody." It was Captain Deakins in the hallway now. Tall and authoritative, with dark blond hair going gray, he stood near the door to the squad room. "My people, listen up. I know this is tough. Fact is, the bastards hit us hard today. But we've still got jobs to do. FDNY and Port Authority are doing theirs. We'll step up when asked, but for now, let's not forget the people we're supposed to be helping."

Jimmy Deakins walked down the hall to the windows for a moment, looked at the burning towers, feeling as if he needed to see the actual buildings and not the TV images. He had to blink back tears himself. Yes, they still had a job to do, but just for a moment, he wanted to grieve for his city.

He couldn't afford to lose it now. He had to set an example for the others.

"Goren." He turned to where Bobby stood, staring out the window. "You okay?"

Bobby nodded silently, his throat tight. "I just…I need a minute." He turned abruptly, strode quickly away, his head down.

Deakins watched him go, then looked at Alex. "What is it?"

"Emily…" Alex cleared her throat and put a lid on her emotions for the moment. She could cry later, when she wasn't surrounded by her fellow officers. "His girlfriend. She's in Tower One. Ninety-first floor. She's on her way down the stairs."

He nodded. "You two finish your paperwork on the Madison case?"

"It's all done and ready to be filed away."

He nodded again. It was so surreal to talk about their work when the city was under attack. Who knew what was coming next.

"Damn!" someone shouted from the vicinity of the TV. "They hit the Pentagon, too!"

"What the…" Both Captain Deakins and Alex moved to where the others were gathered, staring up at the TV as pictures of the Pentagon in flames flashed across the screen.

It wasn't just their city being attacked, but their country. The President was giving a speech at an elementary school in Florida and he made a few comments before being whisked away by Secret Service personnel. The Capitol building and the White House had both been evacuated, along with the Vice President and all of the cabinet members. All were in undisclosed locations for their own safety and the security of the country.

It was confirmed now by the FAA that as many as three, maybe four planes had been hijacked that morning and used as weapons to attack them. There were sporadic reports of that fourth plane being headed for the Capitol building but nothing had been confirmed yet.

Every airport in the country was closed to air traffic. The planes were ordered to the ground at the nearest facility. No one could say what would become of the passengers who couldn't reach their destinations because the planes were being grounded. At the moment it was security first and everyone was ordered out of the sky, or they would risk being shot down. That alone was enough to make it all the more terrifying.

Lower Manhattan was closed off. Port Authority cops were on the way in, as were dozens of battalions of firefighters. They were ordering escaping civilians to keep going north, away from the World Trade Center.

All over the city, people were videotaping what they saw. People who didn't know one another were nodding their heads in agreement and talking about how swift should be the retaliation against whomever had done this. There was a general consensus that it was Islamic terrorists from the Middle East and reports were already coming in that there had been cell phone calls from another possibly hijacked plane, but so far, these were unconfirmed.

The twenty-four hour news cycle had finally come into its own. There wasn't a news outlet or TV network that wasn't focusing their cameras on those burning towers, and the jagged hole in the side of the Pentagon.

Alex grabbed her cell phone as it rang. "Dad…I'm fine," she said before he could speak. "Where's Jared's unit? Are they headed downtown?"

"They are." Johnny Eames, a retired police officer and father of two sons and a daughter who had followed him into the NYPD, plus another son who was a firefighter, stood watching his TV at his home in Far Rockaway. "I just talked to him. They're headed down Broadway. It's chaos down there, baby girl. Where are you?"

"One PP. I'm at the windows, looking southwest. Most of us were standing here watching when the second plane hit." She took a breath, steadied herself and tried not to think of her younger brother Jared headed for the fires. "Dad, tell Mom I'm okay. We're just…we're waiting it out. The building's secure and so far there are no additional threats. I'll keep in touch, okay?"

"You take care of yourself, Alexandra." Stoically he bit back the tears and refused to let them fall. His girl was tough. She'd be okay. "And call your mother when you get home safe tonight, you hear?"

"I will. I…Dad…" Despite herself, she couldn't keep the tremor out of her voice. "I love you."

A single tear did escape now. "I love you, too, Lexie. Call us when you get home."

She ended the call, nodded at one of the others who asked if she was alright, and made a beeline for the ladies room. She locked herself into a stall and silently let the tears come.


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The first thing Emily thought when she moved into the stairwell was that it was so dark. There were no emergency lights working and if it hadn't been for Jim and a few others who had grabbed flashlights, they wouldn't have been able to see anything at all.

There was also water running down the stairs, maybe from a broken pipe, and the surface was slippery. A few people were slipping along, some falling, some just skidding, and Emily grabbed the arm of the woman in front of her when she stumbled backward.

"It's okay, honey," she said when the woman cried out. "You're okay. Just keep going."

The staircase wasn't wide enough for two people to go down side by side and it was slow going. Jim was a few steps above her and Charles was somewhere down below them. She had lost sight of Andrew and Marty, but Holly and Mandy were just ahead of her.

There was no panic, just the pure, sharp scent of fear. Everyone was moving as quickly as they could and they finally reached a landing where there were emergency lights on. Emily glanced up at the numbers and then just kept going down. Only eighty-eight floors to go.

Somewhere around eighty-five, she lost sight of Holly and Mandy as she stopped and waited to allow two security guards to pass her on their way up. Jim was still behind her and he encouraged her as they kept going down.

"We're okay, Emily. Just keep moving."

She nodded, kept the wet paper towels she clutched in her hand firmly clamped against her mouth. The smoke was thicker now and even with the emergency lights, it was hard to see.

"Good lord, Jim," she exclaimed when they hit a particularly smoky pocket. "It's like the stairway to hell."

"Yeah, and a helluva story we'll have to tell, too." He kept his hand on her shoulder as they descended the stairs. "Melinda was pretty calm once I told her we were okay and headed down. Seems I'm going to be a daddy, Emily. At fifty-one! Who would've thought?"

They had reached the seventies now and there were people crying, some shouting out that they needed help. Jim turned and saw there was a man in a wheelchair near the open door of seventy-six, staring helplessly as people pushed past him, headed for the stairs.

Jim stopped, his eyes locked on the eyes of the young man in that chair who couldn't have been more than twenty-five. He was just sitting there quietly, tears rolling down his cheeks. Jim squeezed Emily's shoulder.

"Keep going," he said as he stopped and turned back. "Just keep going."

Emily nodded. "I'll see you at the bottom," she said and watched him push through the small crowd of people near the door and bend to say something to the man before he lifted him right out of the chair and laid him across his shoulders, just the way the firefighters did it.

Tears blinded her as much as the smoke did as she kept moving. There were more people coming up now, firefighters trying to reach the people in the upper floors. She stepped through the door to seventy-three and saw the Port Authority workers swarming about, assisting people to the stairways.

She waited for a moment, tried to breathe as the clearer air on this floor surrounded her, and then someone took her arm, a man she didn't recognize.

"Stairway B is moving faster," he said. "Let's go that way."

She nodded, turned down the hall and quickly followed where he led. It was true, Stairway B was moving faster. There was more room, as it was wider, and there were more people there who seemed to know what was happening outside.

"Terrorists," someone said. "It was those damned Arabs! Bastards! Flew a freaking plane into the Pentagon, too. Who knows how many are still out there."

"We have to get the hell out of this building," someone else said as he brushed past her. "No telling if it's stable or not. We just have to get out."

Oh God! She hadn't even thought of that possibility!

Her dancer's legs were strong and they could take the strain of so many stairs, but the fear trembling through her made it hard to breathe and she stopped on the landing at sixty, wishing desperately for a window to get some air from, but the stairways were in the core of the building. The only way to get to a window was to go out onto one of the floors and she was afraid there was no time for that.

Her purse was still there, strapped across her body, and she thought of her phone, thought of calling Bobby again. But when she tried, the lines were too jammed and she couldn't get through.

There were more people crying now as the firefighters continued to race upward, past the people on their way down. There were shouts of encouragement as the rescue workers called out to them to keep going down and then shouted to each other about making a sweep of each floor.

"What if they're not done?" cried a woman behind her. "What if there are more planes out there? We'll all die in here!"

"It's okay, Maureen," a man's voice said. "Don't think about that now. Just keep moving."

Emily's eyes were filling with tears once again at the thought of what could still happen. What if, indeed? If terrorists could hijack airplanes and fly them into the towers, they could do the same with trains or buses. They could be on the ground now, planning a full-scale attack of targets all around the city. Or the country even.

She didn't want to die. Not now. It wasn't time. It just wasn't time. It couldn't be. She still had so much to do, so much life still to live. She and Bobby had only just begun to explore the new facets of their relationship. She wanted a future with him, wanted to spend her life in his arms. She wanted children. His children. And her dancing…there was still so much life to be lived. It couldn't be her time. Not yet.

Even so, and while she silently, fervently hoped, she stopped on the landing at forty-eight and dug a ballpoint pen out of her purse. Sobbing, she pulled up her left sleeve and carefully wrote on her arm: My name is Emily Ryan. If found please call, and then, beneath that, Bobby's name and phone numbers, and then her mother's.

If she was hurt, and couldn't respond, or if…well…she wasn't going to let herself think too hard about that. She just wanted to be sure that Bobby and her family would know what, if anything, happened to her.

She started down the stairs again, wishing she could at least talk to Bobby again, but the lines were so jammed all she got was a busy signal and an "all circuits are busy now" recording.

On forty, she encountered a heavy-set woman wearing a purple dress, her brown hair peppered with gray, who seemed to be struggling to breathe as she sluggishly moved across the landing, put her hand on the railing near the wall.

"Ma'am?" Emily put a hand on her shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"I can't…" A pair of soft brown eyes looked at her, swimming with tears. "I can't do it," she murmured. "I'm so tired. I started at seventy-three…I just can't do it anymore."

"Sure you can, honey." Emily laid an arm around the woman. "I'll help you, okay? We'll do this together. I'm Emily. What's your name?"

"Sandra."

"Okay, Sandra. You and me are just going to keep moving, okay? Just one step at a time."

Sandra nodded. Tired, she thought. Just so tired. "I promised my grandkids I'd take them to Coney Island this weekend. Didn't think I'd be dying today."

"You're not going to," Emily said firmly. "We're going to keep moving down these stairs until we get to the bottom. And then we're going to open the doors and get across the concourse. We'll be outside before you know it."

"Bless you child, for being so optimistic." Sandra tried to smile, but it didn't quite reach her eyes.

Emily patted her shoulder and they kept descending, but very slowly now. She could see that Sandra was long past the point of losing most of her strength. She was crying softly and Emily knew that if she didn't keep her moving, the woman was just going to give up. She could feel her despair like a living presence and she did her best to reassure her as they took each step with agonizing slowness.

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It had been nearly an hour since Bobby had talked to Emily. He had tried concentrating on something other than the frightening images playing constantly on the TV someone had rolled in and set up in the squad room. So far, he hadn't been able to.

There were others with open cases who had left to interview witnesses, just like any other day. Those that were left milled about, catching up on paperwork and stopping often to watch the latest news crawl along the bottom of the screen. Live images of the burning towers shared the screen with news personnel who were getting out the information they received as quickly as it came in.

Alex stood beside him as he stopped to listen to Tom Brokaw describing the scene in Lower Manhattan as scores of people walked northward, away from the towers. Others were crowding around, watching the live footage from a news camera on West Broadway showing people hurrying up the streets, some crying, some with their faces grimly set. And a split screen had a view from one of the news helicopters as people continued to jump from both towers.

"Guys…look…" That was Ritchie again. "Tower Two's leaning!"

Bobby stood staring at the image on the screen as an icy blade of fear sliced through him and turned his blood to ice. The top of the tower seemed to be sliding to one side and then the entire thing collapsed in a cloud of smoke and dust and debris.

His stomach dropped right into his feet. "Oh, God," he whispered. "Emily."

He grabbed his phone and punched the key for her number.



[size="3"]

On the landing of the twenty-sixth floor, Emily was very nearly carrying Sandra herself. As the woman outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, it wasn't an easy thing to do. Just getting her down each step and then across the landing to the next set of stairs took nearly every bit of strength and will that Emily had.

She and Sandra were the only people left in that part of the stairs aside from the two firemen who had just stepped out of the door that led to twenty-six.

Matt Rickman was twenty-four, and a first year rookie. The Trade Center attack was his first major disaster and he had been grateful to be paired up with Sal D'agastino, a twenty-year veteran firefighter. Sal had been in skyscraper fires before and had worked the bombing at the Trade Center back in '93.

Now both of them looked at the tiny young woman who was struggling to help an older, very large woman down the stairs. They were never going to make it without help.

Even though their radios were for crap in the stairwell, while they'd been making their sweep on twenty-six, they'd heard a garbled transmission that sounded like someone saying Tower Two had collapsed. Whether that was what the transmission had really said, Sal wasn't sure. But he had a gut feeling they had precious little time to work with and he nodded at Matt and then stepped forward and took Sandra's arm.

"Okay, ladies," he said and tried to sound jovial. "We're gonna step it up just a bit here."

Emily smiled at the intensely Brooklyn accent. "It's been slow going," she said. "She's barely hanging onto her strength."

"What's your name, ma'am?" Sal directed this to Sandra.

"Sandra," she managed as she felt the big man's arm around her waist. Emily was behind her now, one hand still on her shoulder as they took another step down. "I'm not going to make it. You should…just go on…I'm so tired…"

"We're not leaving you, honey," Emily said firmly. "We're all going to make it down these stairs together." She turned to the firefighter beside her. "I'm Emily."

"Matt." He laid a hand on her shoulder. "How you doin'?"

"Been better. Smoke's a little thicker now than it was."

He passed her a small oxygen mask. "Take a few easy breaths…not too deep…that's it."

"Thank you." Emily passed the mask back to him. She felt a little better after getting some good air and she watched as Sal did the same for Sandra even as they all kept going down the stairs.

There were other firefighters below them, coming off the various floors, shouting that they'd made a clean sweep and everyone was out on each one. It was oddly surreal, being in that staircase, with only Sandra and a few firefighters. Only a short time ago, there had been scads of people headed down those stairs, but then, her slow progress while helping Sandra had left her well behind them.

She thought of Jim and Charles, and the others, and hoped they were all safely outside now as she followed behind the well-built firefighter who was helping Sandra. He had said his name was Sal and he reminded her faintly of an older version of Andy Garcia.

"You're in great shape, Emily," Matt said as they hit the eighteenth floor landing. "You're taking these flights like you didn't just come down…how many floors did you say?"

"I started on ninety-one," she told him. "I was in Stairway C at first. I switched over here at seventy-three."

"Holy cow," he exclaimed and hoped he didn't sound like a rube. "Ninety-one! And you're not tired?"

"Oh, I'm getting there now," she said and managed to grin at him, despite the sense of impending doom gnawing a hole in her stomach. "I'm a dancer. Good leg muscles."

"What kind of dancer?" Matt made a quick little movement with his booted feet. "I do a pretty good two-step shag myself."

"I'm a ballerina…and a Carolina girl. We're born knowing how to shag. I think it's in the genes somewhere."

Their nervous laughter echoed in the odd silence of the stairwell, punctuated now and then by shouts from people far above or far below. It helped somehow, to know they weren't all alone in there, and now and then Emily would put a hand on Sandra's shoulder and give it a gentle rub.

They were moving a little faster now, coming up on the landing of the fourth floor. Above them, they could hear other firefighters talking as they came down the steps.

"Almost there, Sandra," Emily said. "Only four-and-a-half flights to go."

Just as they reached the landing, the floor began to vibrate. It took Emily only the breathe of an instant to know – just know – that the building was coming down on them. All one-hundred-six floors above were going to land on them any second.

There was a thundering roar, like a thousand freight trains coming at them, wheels screeching, and then a wind that seemed to come from nowhere. The stairwell became a wind tunnel as the energy level rose and everything around them vibrated and shook. The noise was absolutely deafening as the floor rippled and bucked beneath their feet.

It was steel twisting and concrete grinding.

It was a tornado, a hurricane, and an earthquake.

It was the world shattering into a billion pieces.

The sky really was falling.

Emily screamed, but she couldn't hear herself. The screams scored her throat, vibrated over her tongue, as she felt Matt and another man throw their arms around her. The three of them landed in a tight ball against the wall in a corner of the landing.

The men's bodies were pressing her close, curling protectively around her, and they did their best to hold onto her as the force of the collapse bounced them up off the floor, and back down, again and again. She closed her eyes as the tears rolled down her face and her head banged against the wall.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

One hundred and six floors slamming into each other, coming toward them.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Oh, Bobby, she thought. I love you. I love you so much.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Was that heaven coming down to scoop them up, or hell reaching up, trying to claim them? Murmuring the rosary as she sobbed, Emily kept her head down and waited for the end.



At ten-twenty-five, Bobby was once again at the window at the end of the hall. He'd been trying to call Emily for nearly a half-hour and he couldn't get a call through. The lines were completely jammed.

Manhattan was completely shut down. All bridges and tunnels had been closed, trains were stopped, some in the stations, some secured in the tunnels. No one was getting in or out of the city by car or truck unless they were emergency services personnel.

There was already a mass exodus of people on foot, walking across the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge. There were no cars allowed so the people were walking, moving en masse to get out of the city and home to their families. There were reports of boats pulling up at the docks, and at Battery Park, to ferry people across the harbor to Brooklyn, or to Staten Island, or Jersey City.

He and Emily would just have to stay in the city, he thought. They'd get a decent room somewhere, up in mid-town, away from the haze of smoke hanging in the air downtown. And they'd be okay. They'd be together.

Even as he thought this, he was staring intently at the North Tower, his heart sinking like lead as he saw the way it was beginning to lean just the slightest bit. Seconds later it simply crumbled.

His hands lifted and slapped against the glass and he watched helplessly as the building pancaked down onto itself, spewing a cloud of dust and debris just as the other one had.

And like a whisper inside his heart he heard Emily's voice.

I love you. I love you so much.

His heart pounded like a jackhammer in his chest as that cloud spread through the streets. A faint groan in his throat came out in a choked whimper. All he could think was that he had just watched the death of the only woman he had ever loved.

Alex found him there, moments after the collapse. She had been watching it happen on the TV in the squad room and with a heavy heart she went looking for her partner.

Eight months of working together and they had formed a comfortable partnership. Maybe it wasn't a true friendship yet, but it was headed that way, and now she just wanted to be there for him.

She could almost imagine what he was feeling. She'd lost her husband Joe four years before. He was a cop, too, and had been shot to death in the line of duty. Not taken down in a building collapse, but no less shocking in any case.

Now she stood beside Bobby, lifted her hand to lay it on his shoulder. He stood silent and shaking, both hands pressed on the window, as though he could reach Emily if he pushed hard enough.

"She might've gotten out, Bobby," she said quietly. "You said yourself she was on her way down when you talked to her."

"Yeah." His heart was stuck in his throat. He could hardly breathe. "I just…I have to…go…" God, he couldn't think! "I need to find her…I have to look…"

"I know." She gave his shoulder a light rub. "We'll both go. We'll find her."

"Fire department's set up a command post on West Street," Captain Deakins said behind them. "The gym at Manhattan Community College is being used as a triage center."

Bobby turned to look at him, his eyes wide and stricken. "I…I have to find her. She was almost out. She must be…she's down there somewhere…"

Captain Deakins nodded. "Go," he said gently, then nodded gravely at Alex and stood watching them walk down the hall toward the elevator.

For the past week, Goren had had a visible spring in his step and a happy gleam in his eyes. He wanted to meet the woman who had managed to put it there and he sent up a silent prayer that they would find Emily alive.

I'm speechless. This is so powerful and moving, I just don't have the words. And I really, really, really hope chapter 4 is coming soon because I have to know that Emily is OK. She IS OK...right?

Coming soon, I promise! I am tweaking Ch 4 and will post it once I get home from church this evening.

Haven't you been reading what OBC and I have been posting back and forth about this? She's a happy ending junkie, too, and believes that all her relationships should end in marriage! So, everything will work out all right. Don't know what kind of shape Emily will be in, or whether or not she will dance again, but she will get out and be reunited with Bobby.

OBC -- I have to agree with ciaddict as to how powerfully moving this chapter is. You wrote it so beautifully, like you were really there when it happened. Great job! I, too, am ready for more!

I had to re-log in to comment after reading this, all I can say is wow. Very gripping and powerful and I'm with flashymom and her predictions.

Waiting paitently for the next chapter

Okay y'all - here is Chapter 4. I never write anything that's very short, so I'm going to have to break this one into two posts, too. And a little hint ahead of time for CIaddict - No worries!

Thanks all of you for the compliments and feedback. I'll be working on Chapter 5 over the next few days and will post it as soon as it's finished.

What Matters Most

Chapter 4

Time had stopped, or so it seemed. There was no more wind, no more crashing, no sound at all except the occasional tinkle of rock hitting metal. Emily could hear someone breathing next to her ear and it dawned on her that they were alive. They were alive!

Over one-hundred floors had crashed down on them and they were alive!

She was on the floor, and there were two men on top of her, with their arms still wrapped around her; the stiff fabric of their fire coats rubbed against her cheek as she turned her head a bit and opened her dry, gritty eyes to the darkness.

"Emily?" That was Matt. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she managed, though her throat was dry as dust. "I'm still here."

"I can't see a damn thing," he said, and she could hear the tears in his voice. "But your voice is like music. We're still here. Thank God, we're still here!"

There were shouts from below them, other voices calling out, and Emily realized that they weren't alone in there. Matt and the other man, whose name she didn't know, eased away from her and helped her sit up before they both turned on their flashlights.

They aimed their beams around, found Sal crouched on the other end of the landing, his arms around Sandra as she sobbed with relief. Below them, on another part of the stairway, were more of their guys, their flashlights beaming upward like rays of hope in the darkness.

"How…" Emily looked at the odd configuration of rubble and debris dimly lit by the flashlights and shook her head. "We should be dead," she whispered. "Oh my God…" Her voice trailed away as she stared at the destruction around them.

Matt turned, put a hand on her shoulder. "But we're not. I don't know why we're not, but let's go with what we got here. No sense trying to figure it out."

"I'll tell you the honest truth, Matt," she said him tearfully. "If I had to end up trapped underneath a hundred floors of any building, I'm glad it's this building on this day, with all of you. There's nothing quite like being surrounded by a bunch of guys who are trained for this kind of stuff. Isn't that right, Sandra?"

"You said it," Sandra managed through her gasping sobs. "You sure said it!"

Matt sent her a smile and then aimed his light out and around, examining their surroundings. Somehow they had managed to land on top of a pile of debris. Their section of the staircase was somehow still intact. He wasn't even going to question how. He was going to take it as God's divine plan of survival and be grateful for it.

Emily rubbed at the grit on her face, felt something wet and realized she was bleeding. Her fingers found the jagged lines of a scratch near her left temple, and as the shock of being alive began to wear off, the pain started to set in.

She hurt in all manner of places and she moved her legs, her arms, bent her knees, rotated her feet… God, her feet! But nothing was broken as far as she could tell. Just bumps and bruises, and plenty of achy soreness from the beating her body had taken during the collapse, despite the two firefighters best efforts to cover her.

There were men talking all around her now, discussing what to do. Apparently, one of them was a battalion chief and she couldn't help but think how lucky she and Sandra were to have people around them who knew what to do.

She looked around again, still stunned that they had survived being buried under the entire building. There were odd jumbles of twisted beams and concrete, rebar and pipes, like some sort of weird art display of modern industry. And there were just piles and piles of rubble. Stuff was in pieces everywhere and there was the scent of fire and burning plastic, and the underlying smell of dust and soot and dirt, and God only knew what else. It was a smell she couldn't explain and she tried not to think about what she was breathing in as she sat there and listened to the snatches of conversation all around her as the men tried to get in touch with someone outside.

She struggled not to be afraid, not to think about the fact that they could still die if there were any secondary collapses. The whole building was down. She was very nearly sure of that. But the pile of rubble could be unstable and who knew what was just above them. All she could see in the faint glow of the flashlights was twisted metal and something that looked like a huge slab of concrete sticking straight up in the air maybe twenty feet or so from where they had landed.

Even the thought of the building coming down was almost too much for her mind to comprehend at the moment. She hoped fervently that the others had gotten out before the collapse. She thought about the people on the ground and wondered at the terror they must have felt watching the tower come crashing down. And she thought of Bobby, and all the others, watching it from all over the city, on TV and from the windows of their buildings.

She dug into her purse then, tried her phone, but the battery was dead. She closed her eyes for a brief moment and thought of Bobby, watching while the building fell, and not knowing if she was dead or alive.

She wanted her arms around him so badly they ached.

More tears now as she scooted over to where Sandra sat, looking dazed. There was a tiny trickle of blood running down the side of her face and she was rocking herself silently. Emily put an arm around her and they sat close together, silently crying, while Matt, Sal, and the others were discussing their options and trying to come up with a plan.

"It's going to be okay, Sandra," she said through her tears. "We're going to be just fine. They'll figure out a way to get us out of here."

There was dirt everywhere and Emily brushed a great deal of it from Sandra's hair as she held onto her and cried softly along with her. She had dirt in her own hair, too, though not quite as much, as she had been sheltered beneath Matt and the other man, whose name she had since learned was Rick. She could feel the grit of it on her neck and smell it on her clothes, but she wasn't completely covered in it as Sandra was.

Her clip was long gone and her hair was hanging in tangled curls. She suddenly imagined herself at home, soaking in a hot, luxurious bubble bath. Even that, she knew, wouldn't take away the stench from her nostrils. She knew she would always remember the smell of the burning debris that was all around them. Carpets and furniture, computers and paper…and people.

Yes, she thought sorrowfully. There had still been people trapped on the floors above ninety-one. There had been no hope of escape for them. The plane, the explosion, and the resulting fire would have cut off the stairways above the impact zone and rendered them helpless to get out. She'd seen those twisted elevator doors. She could only imagine what it had looked like above her floor.

The tears overwhelmed her now as she remembered how those poor people had begun jumping, choosing the open air and a quick death over burning and choking on the smoke.

Rick Shelton knelt down in front of the two women and laid a hand on Emily's shoulder. "Here…drink some of this…" Miraculously, someone had found a bottle of water on one of the stairs.

Emily took the water, sipped and wanted to cry harder with the relief of that wetness going down her parched throat. "Thank you," she said tearfully as she handed the bottle to Sandra.

"You okay?" Rick examined her eyes in the dim light. Beautiful eyes, he thought, and glittering with tears.

"I'm trying to be," she said. "Does anyone know we're here?"

"Not yet, but we're still trying the radios." He eased her sleeve up, checked her pulse, and looked down at the writing on her arm. It sent a wave of sorrow through him to realize what it meant. "Your family?" he asked with a nod at her arm.

"Yes." She tugged her sleeve back down slowly. "Bobby's my…my boyfriend," she managed, though her throat ached with the lump that was stuck there like a hot, prickly ball. "And Sabrina is my mother."

"That prefix…it's One PP. He's a cop?"

"A detective," she nodded. "Major Case."

Rick rubbed her shoulder gently. "You'll see him again soon enough," he said. "Just about every battalion in the city is out there, working their way in. We'll be outta here in no time."

"He's probably freaking out right about now. The last time I talked to him I was over in Stairway C, just starting down." She blinked as the tears started to fall again. "He…he doesn't even know I'm okay," she said softly.

Rick thumbed a tear from her cheek. "I'd lay odds he's out there right now, looking for you."

"Me, too," Matt chimed in as he checked Sandra for injuries. "Just wait. I bet you walk outta here in a little while and he's right there, waiting for you."

Emily took a shaky breath, sniffled. "Thanks guys." She swiped at her tears. "We're sure enough getting out of here. All of us." And she gave Sandra a hugging shake. "You hear me, sugar? You got grandkids waiting to ride the Cyclone next weekend."

"I sure do," Sandra answered, feeling better after Matt gave her some more water. "Fearless, they are. Both of them."

"So are you," Emily said and hugged her again. "Don't you ever forget it."

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Out in the streets, Bobby was, in fact, looking for her. He was scouring the streets, searching the many faces in the shell-shocked crowds of people as he and Alex made their way across City Hall Park and down Chambers Street, headed toward West.

He was shaking inside, his heart pounding as they got closer to the college and saw the people milling about. The walking wounded, he saw, and there were tons of them. People with superficial cuts and scratches, others with torn clothing and sooty faces. And then, as they rounded the corner onto West, he got his first real look at the skyline in the distance, about four blocks away, and he was stunned at the emptiness.

Where the two towers had once stood, there was only open air, and smoke. Lots of smoke. It billowed upward from the site, from the pile of rubble that was concrete, steel and glass.

And people, he thought. There were people buried under all of that. And they were most certainly all dead. Already they were estimating that the death toll could be in the tens of thousands, depending on how many people had actually been inside at the time of the attack.

Emily might be one of them.

With a choking sound that he tried to hide from Alex, he shoved that thought away as they kept walking. He'd already tucked his tie into his jacket pocket, opened the collar of his shirt, and tried to give himself room to breathe. It didn't help.

He couldn't think beyond finding Emily. He searched the crowds for her face. For any glimpse of her at all.

Those that had made it out before the towers fell were still coming out of the haze that hung over the streets. Some of them had ducked into storefronts or building lobbies to escape the debris cloud that had shot over and between the buildings to cover everything in its path.

These people were covered head-to-foot in a grayish-white dust and looked like ghosts coming up the street and the sidewalks.

"We should look at the triage center first," Alex said, even as she stared at the stricken, ash-covered faces around them. "They've got water there, and they're cleaning people up. She might be there."

Bobby nodded, hardly able to take his eyes from the rising smoke just down the street. Finally he did, and turned to follow Alex back toward the college, to the triage center in the gym.

He checked the list of names at the door first, his heart sinking when he didn't find Emily's there. He did, however, see Jim McMillan's name there. Maybe Emily just hadn't given them her name yet. Maybe…

Alex watched his face, saw the emotions that raced over it, and wished like hell she knew what to say to him. And then she saw a familiar face. "Jared!"

Jared Eames turned around, still wearing his gear but minus the helmet for the moment, and stared at his sister. "Alex! What are you doing down here?" He moved to grab her into a fierce hug. "Damn! You shouldn't be down here."

"Yeah, yeah. And 'hello' to you, too." But she hugged him back, just as fierce, before she drew away to gesture toward Bobby. "We're looking for someone. Any chance that someone could be treated here, but not get on the list?"

"Maybe." But he looked doubtful. "They're pretty good about taking the names of everyone, though. Who're you looking for?"

"Bobby's girlfriend Emily. She was at a meeting in Tower One, on the ninety-first floor."

"Nobody above ninety-one had a chance," Jared said soberly. "The impact took out the elevators and made the stairs impassable from ninety-two on up."

"The last time he talked to her, she was on the stairs, on her way down."

"She could've ducked into a building down the street when the tower came down," Jared said thoughtfully. "That's what we did. Couldn't see a damn thing down there. It was like being in a blizzard. Total whiteout."

Someone called out to him now and he nodded, held up his hand in acknowledgment. "Gotta go, sis," he said and then moved to hug her again. "We're going down there to see if we can find anyone alive in that mess. Take care, you, and don't go playing hero, got me?"

"Get outta here!" She swatted at him and tried not to think of where he was going as she watched him walk away. After a moment, she turned back to Bobby. "We'll keep looking," she said. "We'll just keep looking."

He nodded numbly, the despair beginning to set in as he scanned the faces, desperately hoping to see Emily's. Eventually he did find Jim McMillan. Not by sight, but by asking around to see if he was still there.

"Last time I saw Emily, she was headed down Stairway C," Jim said as he drank more water from a plastic bottle. "I stopped to help someone who couldn't walk and told her to keep going. I thought she would be out before me and I'd meet her down on the sidewalk."

"You never saw her after that?" Oh, yes, the heart really could break. His was doing just that, cracking like glass at Jim's words.

"No." Sadly, Jim shook his head. "We made it to the concourse and it was total chaos down there. I only managed to find three of my people at the bottom. Debris was falling everywhere and there were rescue workers down there who ushered us toward the doors as quickly as possible. The crashing…" His hands shook as he sipped more water.

"It was bodies," he said. "People were jumping from the windows and landing on the roof. We got outside, made it all the way to Vesey before Trade Two started falling. Then we just ran like hell. A couple of us were half-dragging, half-carrying this poor kid who couldn't walk. It was a nightmare."

There was nothing else he could say. Emily should have been out of the building and far up the street by the time Tower Two fell. She shouldn't have even been inside Tower One when it went down. But then, where was she? Obviously something had happened, or she would have gotten to him by now. She would have called if she could, or made it to the triage center. Something.

Maybe she was still out there somewhere, having sought shelter from the debris as the building fell. Maybe…

He stood up, laid a hand on Jim's shoulder. "If I find her, I'll make sure she calls you."

"Same goes," Jim answered and then, with a nod and a serious set to his mouth, Bobby gestured to Alex and they headed back out into the street.

"She might be in one of those buildings," he said and pointed down West Street. "She could be anywhere, holed up and waiting for the dust to settle."

Determined to help him, even though it looked less and less likely that Emily had survived, Alex followed him down the street, scanning the crowd herself for any glimpse of Emily's face.

They searched store fronts and lobbies, all the while moving closer and closer to the center of the destruction. They had their badges clipped in plain view and were able to move through the streets without anyone stopping them.

Bobby had a small picture of Emily in his wallet and he had it out now, to show anyone he could find, ask if they'd seen her. No one had.

The street was covered with ash, like gray snow, and it was inches deep. There were cars parked here and there along West and they were covered with that same ash, and dented where debris had fallen on them.

The street, the sidewalks, even the tops of the cars were strewn with debris. Chunks of the buildings, file folders and paper, bits of furniture, like the back of a leather chair, and office equipment, mangled almost beyond recognition. Alex stared for a long moment at a fax machine that had landed on top of a small Honda and nearly gone right through the roof from the force of the impact.

They walked and walked, even going down side streets, doubling back and checking everywhere they thought they hadn't been, but there was no sign of Emily at all.

Bobby's heart was plunging now, sliding down toward his feet as the reality of it all began to set in. It had already been hours and there was no sign of her. The bright light of hope was dimming to barely a flicker.

If she was out there somewhere, she would have gotten in touch with him by now. Even if she'd had to take refuge in a store, or the lobby of a building, she would have come out long before now. She would have found a way to call him.

His heart was a mass of burning lead that was almost too heavy to bear. The pain was starting to come now, seeping into his bones, snaking around him like those tendrils of smoke that were climbing into the sky not far from where he stood.

He pulled out his cell phone, looked at the last text message she had sent, just before the first plane had hit. Can't wait. Luv U 2.

It seemed important to him suddenly to have that, to be able to look at it and think of her smiling as she typed those words to him. He thought back and remembered the last thing she had said to him before they hung up the phone…before she'd gone into that stairwell and never come out.

I really love you, Bobby.

He closed his eyes for a brief moment and could almost hear her voice. Almost…

Alex's eyes were swimming with tears. The destruction was so complete, so terrible. Not only were the Twin Towers gone, but every building in the Trade Center complex was either destroyed or on the verge of falling down. Add to that the loss of life, both in New York and in Washington, D.C., and the plane they'd heard about that had crashed in Pennsylvania, just twenty minutes from it's destination, which people were speculating was either the White House or the Capitol building.

In her entire life, she had never seen anything like it. The bombing in '93 hadn't been anything like this, nor had the one in Oklahoma City in '95. The towers had not fallen in the last attempt, and the Murraugh Building in Oklahoma City had at least remained standing after the blast, until it was demolished by the city some weeks later.

And, unlike those past events, this entire, hellish morning had been captured on live TV. It wasn't just New Yorkers, or the folks in D.C. who witnessed the attacks. The whole world had watched it happen.

"Survivors!" someone shouted, a firefighter, as he ran down the street past them, flanked on both sides by two or three of his fellow firefighters. "Chief Picciotto and a bunch of other guys, plus two civvies. Under the pile and on top of another one."

His heart, leaden and hurting, gave one quick leap. Maybe...

"They were in Stairway B – Tower One," another firefighter said as a group of rescue workers went by them. "Billy got it from the sarge that a huge chunk of the stairway was left intact and landed on top of the f*cking pile. Craziest sh*t I ever heard! How many floors dropped and there's something like ten, maybe twelve people alive on top of that stairway?! Un-f*cking-believable!"

And then Bobby's heart stopped mid-leap and plunged downward again. It couldn't be her then. She and the others had all been in Stairway C.
Alex grabbed Bobby's arm, wondering if one of the civilians might be Emily. And then saw the look on his face. "What? You don't think it might be her?"

He shook his head, rubbed a hand over his eyes as they began to fill with tears. "They said Stairway B," he said thickly. "She was in Stairway C."

"Oh…" She squeezed his arm gently. "I'm sorry, Bobby."

"Yeah." He blinked hard. "Me, too."

It was a miracle anyone had survived the collapse at all and he wanted so much to hope. If the people in Stairway B had made it, then maybe there was a chance that Emily had, too. However slim, he wanted desperately to hold onto it, but when he looked just down the street to that burning mass of steel and concrete, of rubber and wood and glass, he knew that there would have been a precious few that could still be alive underneath all of that, and those few were most likely in what remained of Stairway B.

Emily was gone. He'd have to accept it, to let it sink in, or else he'd drive himself crazy wondering, hoping, waiting. The destruction was so complete, so devastating. He could hardly bear to look at it, but he made himself do it. Made himself face it.

The day had been so perfect, he thought. And then the monster came and the buildings crumbled to dust, taking the woman he loved with them.

He would never see her again. Never hold her again. Never look into her eyes again. Never hear her voice again.

God…did he have a voicemail saved? He thought he might. He didn't want to forget her voice.

He thought back to that morning and saw her as she had been, standing in front of her kitchen windows with the sunlight shining in on her and turning her russet curls to fired gold.

He never wanted to forget her voice, or her face, or the way she felt in his arms. The way she smelled, all feminine and soft. The way her eyes lit with mischief whenever she teased him, or darkened like blue-green fire when she was in a temper.

Why hadn't he realized before how much he loved her? All these months they'd been friends and he'd gotten so used to her being there – just there. A smile in the morning when he saw her outside, on her way to the studio as he was leaving to go to work. Lunches in the city when he could spare a minute during his busy day, or she could. Pizza and beer with Lewis and a couple of his other buddies, a poker game or two, though she didn't care for the game.

An open book, she'd called herself, and she was right. Emily didn't have a chance at poker when everything she thought and felt announced itself on her face.

He'd never be able to tease her about it again.

And then, most recently, there were those long, warm evenings of holding her in his arms and marveling at each new facet of their relationship as they moved from being friends to being so much more. And as much as he had struggled with the idea of permanence, of opening himself and giving all, it was all he wanted. To be with her always, to pledge his life to her. And now he couldn't.

His throat was closing around a hard, hot lump as he stood staring down the street at the emptiness of that sky, and he felt the grief, it's edges razor sharp as they slashed through him. Twin daggers, twisting in his heart, tearing a gaping hole and leaving him hollow.

She was gone. Only that morning he had held her in his arms, kissed her with the sun streaming down on them. And now she was gone.

There was an avalanche inside of him as the pain tumbled and sliced through him with jagged teeth. It was all he could do not to fall to his knees, claw at the ground, scream at the cruel hand of fate that had taken her from him when they'd only just begun.

"Emily." It was a ragged whisper as everything he had dreamed of having with her blew apart and drifted away like the smoke that rose from the rubble and floated skyward.

With a whimper of despair, he backed up and sat down on the curb, mindless of the dirt and ash that covered the ground, and lowered his head into his hands as his heart shattered.



[size="3"]


Emily was standing on the edge of another landing, watching Rick and a couple of the others pick their way across the pile of rubble to the bright laser beam of light that was shining down. There was a hole in the pile somewhere that was letting air and light get in and they were determined to find a way out even as they waited for the rescue crews to find them.

One of the men, she thought he was the one the guys kept calling "Chief", had gotten through to his wife on his cell phone and managed to get their location and a few other bits of information to her before he lost the signal. And then one of the radios had finally worked and some of the other firefighters who had been on the stairs below them had climbed up to meet them, telling them that they'd gotten through to the crews outside.

The cavalry was on its way, though they didn't know exactly how they were going to reach them since there was no way to tell where the stairway actually was. It was going to take them some time to find their way through what was left of the building.

Emily thought of Bobby, and of how frantic he must be by now, not knowing if she was alright. With all of her heart, she wished she was already outside so that she could go to him. She wanted nothing more than to be in his arms, to hold onto him and never, never let go.

"It's okay," Rick shouted back. "It's sturdy enough. We just gotta be careful."

They had already climbed what was left of the staircase and now Sal and another man, she thought his name was Jay, helped Sandra ease onto a thick slab of concrete that acted as a bridge from the landing to the pile where some of the others believed they had found a way out.

"Come on, Emily," Matt said and held out a hand. "Let's blow this joint, huh?"

"You got it." She took his hand and together they climbed gingerly onto the slab, eased slowly along until they stood on top of the debris pile.

"Easy now," he said as she moved carefully along beside him. "We'll just take it slow and sure, follow the others."

It seemed as though it took them hours to climb the pile and then they confronted a mass of columns that Emily recognized as a piece of the façade. It was huge, probably more than fifty feet high, and someone up ahead called out to them to double back then and go around the other way.

It was slow going and Emily stepped carefully along the beams and across chunks of concrete and steel, grateful for Matt's steadying hand on hers. Her shoes were not exactly made for climbing from a pile of rubble after a building collapse and she slipped a few times, but Matt always caught her, and there were two more firefighters climbing up behind them.

Finally, after what felt like forever, they emerged outside and met up with the rescue crew that was looking for them. Emily blinked at the sudden brightness, looked around, and got the shock of her life.

The buildings were gone. They were just gone.

Both towers were down, along with most of the other buildings in the complex save one, and that one looked to be listing to one side as well. All that was left of what had once been the financial and trade center of the world was a huge expanse of debris that spread out in all directions.

"It looks like someone dropped a nuclear bomb," she said, dazed by what she was seeing. "Oh my God…" She stared at Matt and saw his eyes were as wide as hers. "Everything's gone. Just gone…"

Matt glanced around at the smoke billowing, the fires he could see blazing beneath the rubble here and there, and knew just how lucky they all were. "Come on, Emily," he said. "Let's get down from here. Easy now…slow and easy and we'll get down just fine."

What Matters Most

Chapter 4 (Con't)

There were more shouts now, firefighters and uniformed cops running down the street, followed by a couple of paramedics. Bobby stood up slowly, looked down the street and watched them gathering around the bottom of a huge pile of rubble. A couple of firefighters appeared on the top of it and started down amidst shouts from those below.

There were news crews everywhere, trying to get closer, but Bobby paid them no mind. He simply stood there, silently grieving for Emily, even as he watched the men on the ground begin to cheer as their fellow firefighters cleared the top of the pile.

"Looks like they're found," Alex said, standing up beside him. She'd been sitting there silently, her hand on his arm, giving what comfort she could. "Must be the guys from Stairway B."

"Yeah." Bobby nodded his head, watched another firefighter come over the pile, his arm around someone who was much smaller than he was.

And then his heart shot into his throat.

It was a woman; a tiny woman, now flanked by two firefighters. She was picking her way down the pile with an odd kind of careful grace and his heart knew, even before it sank into his brain.

"Emily!" He looked at Alex, his eyes wide. "It's…oh my God…that's Emily."

"Are you sure?" Alex couldn't tell but Bobby was already headed down the street and she had to hurry to keep up with him.

"It's her!" he exclaimed joyfully. "It's her!" And then, as he broke into a run, he shouted her name. "Emily!"

Emily's head came up at the sound of her name and she stepped down off the last beam with Matt and Rick both holding onto her, wanting to cry with relief when her feet touched the ground at last.

She saw Bobby racing toward her, shouting her name, and the tears broke free as she began to run, finding her legs surprisingly able as she hurtled toward him, her arms thrown wide, crying out his name as she ran.

The moment she was close enough, she gave a shriek and launched herself at him. Bobby caught her with one sweep of those powerful arms and swung her right off her feet into a bone-crushing embrace.

"Oh God. . .Emily. . . .I thought you were. . .oh, baby. . .I thought you were dead!" He was shaking all over, his face buried in her hair, heedless of the dirt and soot as the tears coursed hot and fast down his cheeks.

"Oh…Emily…Emily…"

She clung to him, her legs wrapping around his waist as she buried her face in his neck. "Hold me," she choked. "Don't let go."

"Not a chance." He stroked her tangled curls, felt the grit of the dirt and thanked God that she was alive. "Oh, Emily….baby…" His voice trailed off as he lifted her head and then crushed his mouth to hers.

She tasted his tears, and her own, and she cupped his face in her hands and thumbed them away. "I was so afraid I'd never see this face again," she said softly.

He closed his eyes for a moment, rested his forehead against hers. "Oh…damn…" he whispered. "Just…damn…" He kissed her again, holding her so tight. He never wanted to let go of her again.

There were others near them now, men with tears in their eyes as they watched the reunion. Rick and Matt stood waiting for Sal and two of the others to get Sandra over the pile, and both were smiling through tears.

"You go, girl!" Matt shouted.

A sudden laugh bubbled in Emily's throat as she clung to Bobby and then she turned and waved at Matt and Rick. "I want…I need to thank them…"

Bobby nodded slowly, set her on her feet. He kept his arm around her as they walked toward the group of firefighters now clustered around another woman as they helped her down. Alex stayed close behind them, wiping at her own tears as she watched those guys gently helping the heavy-set woman down the pile.

The moment the woman's feet were steady on the ground, she gave a loud cry and would have crumpled right to the ground if it hadn't been for the firefighter that held onto her.

Emily gave Bobby a quick squeeze and then let go, rushed forward to throw her arms around Sandra. "I told you, honey," she cried. "You're going to take those grandkids of yours to Coney Island. We made it, Sandra. We made it!"

"Oh we did!" Sandra wrapped her arms around Emily's tiny little body and clung tight. "We sure did!"

They held onto each other and rocked, both of them sobbing, and then finally Emily turned to throw her arms around Matt, and then Rick, and Sal. Each of them in turn until she was sure she had hugged every last one of those guys who'd been in there with her, encouraging both her and Sandra as they worked to find a way out.

Someone came with a stretcher for Sandra so she wouldn't have to walk the four blocks to the triage and though Emily insisted she could walk okay, Bobby scooped her into his arms and carried her.

Cradling her close as he walked back up West Street, he felt the enormity of the gift he'd been given. Those long, terrible hours, when he had searched and searched for her, and then thought she was gone forever, had taught him that she was more important to him than anything else. After being forced to imagine his life without her in it, he knew now he'd never let her go.

"Jim McMillan will be glad to know you're okay," he said. "He thought you'd be out long before he was."

"I stopped on seventy-three to get some air. Who knows how much time I wasted doing that?" She pressed her face into his neck. "I think…if I hadn't stopped to help Sandra…I don't know where I would have been…maybe in another part of the stairway…maybe not so lucky."

"Why did you stop? Was she hurt?"

Emily lifted her head, looked back at where Sal, Matt, and Rick were carrying Sandra on a stretcher between them.

"Not hurt, no. She was just so tired. She was about to give up." She rested her brow against his cheek. "She was moving so slow, like a snail. She just couldn't make it. By the time Matt and Sal found us on the landing at twenty-six, I was pretty much trying to carry her down each step. I couldn't leave her behind, Bobby. I just…" She choked up. "She's got grandchildren. She told me she was supposed to take them to Coney Island next weekend. And then…she said…"

She sniffled and rubbed at the grit in her eyes as the tears started again. "She said she didn't know she was going to die today. And I told her she wasn't. I couldn't leave her. I just…I couldn't leave her."

Alex could hardly bear to listen to Emily's teary words, much less to look around her at the destruction. She blinked at her tears and kept pace with Bobby's long strides as he carried Emily up the street.

"You're one tough cookie, Emily," she said and tried to smile. "I thought you southern girls were supposed to be demure and genteel."

Emily turned to look at her and her lips curved upward even as the tears kept flowing. "I'm a Lowcountry girl, honey. Genteel on the outside, wildcat on the inside."

"Truer words were never spoken," Bobby said and hitched her up to cuddle her closer as he turned to give Alex a small smile. "You should see her in a temper."

Emily finally had a chance to look around as Bobby carried her up West, toward Chambers, where there was a triage center at the community college. Everything was covered with gray ash. There were mangled and flattened cars, and closer to the site of the collapse there were flattened fire trucks and police cars. There was debris everywhere. She recognized things like computer monitors and phones, and there were chunks of the buildings everywhere that had fallen in the initial explosions.

The destruction was complete and devastating. She thought this must be what it looks like when there's a war. And wasn't it an act of war when someone was evil enough to hijack a jet and ram it into the side of a building?

Bobby had already confirmed what she'd heard from someone on the stairs earlier, that the Pentagon had been attacked, and he said there'd been another plane, most likely headed for the White House or the Capitol, but that one had crashed before it reached Washington.

"The world's gone crazy," she said as they neared the entrance to the triage area. "Hijacked planes crashing into buildings. They're insane. How the heck do you defend yourself against people like that?"

Bobby set her down at the table where there was a woman taking names and answering questions. "I don't know," he said honestly.

Emily gave her name to the woman at the table, then followed her directions to the area where the survivors were being looked over. "I don't need to go to the hospital," she insisted as the medic checked her over. "I'm okay."

In all his years as a paramedic, Randall Chapman had never seen anything like the attacks that morning, and now he could hardly believe this young woman had been buried under a hundred-and-ten floors of rubble and had no injuries other than some small cuts and scratches, and a lot of bruises.

"You were in Tower One when it came down?"

"Yes." Emily winced as he cleaned a scratch on her temple. She knew there was soot all over her face. She could feel it. "I was lucky enough to have a bunch of firefighters in there with me. They'll tell you they were just doing their jobs, but they're heroes," she added and choked up again. "As soon as the shaking stopped and we realized we were still alive, they were putting together a plan to keep us alive and get us out of there. God bless every one of them."

Randall nodded, felt around her head, frowned when she winced. "Nasty bump there," he said. "Might be a concussion. You pay attention to how you feel, okay? You start getting dizzy, nauseated, anything like that, you go to the hospital. Okay?"

"Okay," she agreed, relieved he wasn't going to make her go now. She just wanted to go home and take a bath, and rinse the morning away; watch it go down the drain and maybe take her memory with it.

Randall pushed up her left sleeve so he could put the blood pressure cuff on her. While he did this, he glanced down, saw the writing on her arm. It startled him, and saddened him to think of what she must have been through to have written those words. Not wanting to upset her, he kept his questions to himself. She looked like she'd been through enough.

Bobby saw the words scrawled on her arm, too. The moment the medic unfastened the cuff, he took Emily's hand in his and turned her arm so that he could read what was written there. The words sent a shockwave through him, as though he'd been struck by lightning.

"Emily…" Rocked to the core, he felt his eyes filling. "My God…"

She looked into his eyes, saw the shock there. "If something happened…" She swallowed hard. "I just…I wanted…" She couldn't finish and her vision blurred as the tears began again.

He ran his fingers over those words, over his own name. Moved, shattered, he bent to rest his brow against her temple.

"Damn," he said softly, his fingers curling around hers and gripping hard. "Emily..."

He was going to lose it. Any moment he was going to lose his grip and bawl like a baby. He felt her other hand stroking his hair and he closed his eyes, fought to pull himself together. Later, he thought. Time enough to cry later.

"You should call your mother," he managed. He'd long since called his own mother to let her know he was okay. "She's probably been watching this on TV all day, and trying to reach you."

"Yeah." She kept her arm wrapped around his neck. "My phone's in my purse. Battery's dead. I tried…when we were trapped, I tried to call you, but I couldn't."

He reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone. "Use mine." And then, before he gave it to her, he kissed her hard. "I love you," he whispered fiercely.

She smiled at him through her tears. "I love you," she said back.

While she dialed her mother's number, he pulled an alcohol wipe out of the medic's stash and ripped it open, then began to gently rub the ink off her left arm. The absolute concentration on his face staggered her, made her realize the impact what she'd written there had had on him.

"Mama, it's me," she said when her mother answered. "I'm okay. I wanted you to know I'm okay."

On her end, Sabrina was very nearly shaking. It was the closest to showing weakness she had ever come.

"Dear God, Emily," she said, barely controlling the desire to weep with relief. "Jim McMillan called to see if I'd heard from you yet. He said you were all in a meeting this morning when the first plane hit. Where on earth have you been all of this time? Lincoln and I have nearly been beside ourselves!"

"I was…I tried to call you but my phone was dead," Emily answered, jolted by the crack in her mother's tone. "I was still inside when the building fell…it's just…I stopped to help someone and we were on the fourth floor landing. We were stuck in there awhile – a few hours, I think, until some of the firefighters found us a way out."

"Oh sweet lord!" Sabrina's hands were shaking now and her husband came quickly to her side to ease her down onto the sofa even as she clutched the phone. "You were still in there…"

Emily blinked back fresh tears. "I was," she said softly. "But I'm okay, Mama. I don't know how…it…the stairwell landed on top of one of the piles. It was the strangest thing. And there were a bunch of firefighters in there with us and they were all so great. They knew exactly what to do."

"But you're alright." It was important suddenly to be sure of that one thing. "You're not hurt?"

"Just bumps and bruises. A few scratches, a bump on the head. That's all." She took a slow breath. "Two firefighters were right there with me…they…they both held onto me, covered me as best they could."

The years they had both spent at odds with one another melted away in those moments and all Sabrina could feel was relief that her daughter was alright. She'd already buried her son, and then a few short years later, her first husband. It would have been so cruel if she had lost her daughter, too.

"The TV news says the city is shut down. No one is getting in or out by car. People are walking across the Brooklyn Bridge." Sabrina closed her eyes, pictured her daughter, whole and alive. "You make sure you take care of yourself, darling," she said in a voice that clearly betrayed the tears that were clouding her eyes now. "As soon as I can arrange it, I'm coming up there. I want to see for myself that you're okay."

It was an odd sort of moment, sitting there in that triage center, hearing the tears in her mother's voice, and feeling as though they had built a bridge over the gap that had stretched between them for much too long.

"We'll be in rehearsals for Swan Lake soon," she managed as she trembled with the effort to hold back the tears. "Maybe you and Linc could come up for opening night."

"You just tell us when, darling," Sabrina answered. "We'll be there."

"I love you, Mama."

"I love you, too, Emily. You take care of yourself."

"I will," she promised. "I'll talk to you soon. Give Linc my love."

Once she ended the call, she sat silent for a moment, still holding Bobby's phone in her hand as she thought about how much different her mother had sounded, how gentle her voice had been. It seemed a new day had dawned between them.

She dialed Jim's cell phone then, but he didn't answer, so she left him a voicemail telling him she was okay. She knew he'd tell the others. She assumed they were all okay if he was, since they'd all been together in Stairway C.

She slid Bobby's phone into the pocket of his jacket and sat quietly for a moment, watching him slowly rubbing the last of the ink from her arm. After a moment, she stroked her other hand over his cheek.

"I think maybe you missed your calling," she said. "You could do commercials for Mr. Clean. Well…except that you'd have to shave your head and pierce your ear."

He looked up at her, and the haunted look in his eyes was startling. "Mr. Clean, huh?" he asked, sounding a little choked. "I thought about piercing my ear once. I don't know about the whole bald thing, though."

"Yeah, I like you much better with hair."

She stroked her fingers through it, surprised when he reached back into the cart behind him and took out another small package. When he ripped that one open and took out a small wipe, it didn't smell antiseptic like the other one, but fresher, almost like fruit. He began to slowly dab at her face with it.

She sat there, on a makeshift exam table in a college gymnasium, having barely survived a building dropping on her, and felt her throat snap shut as Bobby gently cleaned the soot and grime from her face. When he was done, he tossed the wipes in a trash can and kissed her mouth softly.

"That'll do until you can get a shower," he said lightly, really trying to hold onto himself. Even though the ink was gone from her arm, he could still see those words, his name and her mother's, and he could only imagine what had been going through her mind when she wrote them. "You've got the all-clear from the medic. What do you say we get out of here and away from this smoke?"

"Yeah." She slid down from the table and then Bobby pulled her into his arms and held her fast for a long, long moment.

"Scared me," he whispered. "No need to do that again."

"I'll second that." She wrapped her arms around him, held tight. "Guess we're walking. My car's at the bottom of the heap down there."

She'd very nearly been at the bottom of that heap, too. Even the thought of it was too much for him at the moment and he rubbed her back a few times, then turned to see Alex walking back over to them.

"I was thinking we'd stay in the city," he said, holding tight to Emily's hand. "Everything's shut down around here and I heard someone say earlier that the uptown trains are jammed."

"You'll never get a cab now," Alex said as the three of them walked slowly through the steady stream of people coming into the triage. "I'll drop you off wherever you want."

"The company has an executive apartment over on Sutton Place," Emily said, as they walked slowly up the street, away from the chaos of what was now officially being called Ground Zero. "I use it sometimes when rehearsals run late. We can stay there."

Sutton Place? Alex threw Bobby a quick look, but he was distracted by something he was brushing out of Emily's hair. She studied him for a minute, saw how close he was to falling apart, and wondered that he hadn't done so already.

He would later, she mused, when he was safely alone. Bobby wasn't a man who liked people to see him at his weaker moments; the fact that she herself had observed one of them earlier that day notwithstanding.

As they walked along Chambers Street, they passed countless people who looked as shell shocked as Emily felt. She tried to think clearly through the maze of thoughts crowding her brain, tried not to dwell overmuch on how close she had come to being killed. And she wished badly for something to clear the smell of the burning rubble from her nostrils.

One Police Plaza looked ready for an appearance by the President. There were barriers set up all around the plaza, blocking off Park Row to all but official traffic, and there were scores of uniformed police officers milling about, acting as guards, checking anyone coming in.

"I don't…God, Bobby, I'm a mess." Emily shook her head as they neared the building.

One look at Bobby's face was enough. Alex knew he wasn't about to leave Emily anywhere alone. "I'll go up, grab my purse, and meet you back here," she said.

"Could you…here…" Bobby fished in his pocket for his wallet, pulled out a tiny key. "Could you grab my bag from my locker upstairs?"

She nodded, took the key from him. "I'll get it," she told him. "Be back in ten."

Emily stood watching people come and go. Other detectives, maybe attorneys, too, as some of them were carrying briefcases. Officers in uniform milled about, going in and out, and some were standing guard around the blocked off parameter.

Those guards and the blockades were the only thing that set this day apart from any other. But for those, the rest would have looked typical of any police headquarters.

Bobby kept an arm around her as they waited silently for Alex to come back. There was so much he wanted to say, but it would have to wait because he didn't think he could say any of it without breaking down completely. So he hugged her close and hoped that the embrace said what he couldn't.





They were all quite on the drive uptown. Bobby and Emily sat huddled together in the backseat of Alex's Honda as they crawled through the crowded streets, headed toward Sutton Place.

For her part, Emily stared numbly out the window at the cars and the people, wondering just how many of them knew someone who hadn't come home yet; who would never come home again.

The sun was dipping lower in the sky as it neared six o'clock. Away from the chaos of lower Manhattan, everything seemed even more like a dream, or maybe an alternate universe.

The events of the morning were distant, and yet much, much too close. Emily didn't like to think about it. She tried not to as she closed her eyes and hoped that she didn't leave the stench of the fire and smoke behind in the car when she got out.

It clung to her hair, to her clothes, her very skin.

There were traffic jams all over the place as people were still trying to leave the city now that the tunnels and bridges were open again. Everything was a slow crawl and Bobby worried over how Emily was doing as the drive seemed to take forever.

His eyes met Alex's in the rearview mirror. He could read the sympathy there and he nodded at her silently as he gathered Emily a little closer. She was much too quiet. He worried over that, wondered what was going through her mind as he stroked her tangled hair and wished she would say something. Her silence was really starting to worry him.

"We should order some dinner," he said to her as Alex pulled up in front of the building where Emily had told her the apartment was located.

"Yeah." Emily nodded, though she couldn't imagine eating just then.

They were stopped at the curb now and she looked at Alex and tried to smile. "Thanks for the ride," she said quietly, then slid out of the car, a mere ghost of the woman she'd been only that morning.

Alex turned to him. "The Captain told me to tell you to take a couple of days, make sure she's okay."

He nodded in agreement. "She's going to be pretty sore tomorrow, and she has a knot on her head that might be a concussion. The medic said she should take it easy." He grabbed his duffel bag and slid gingerly across the seat and out of the car, then leaned back in. "Thanks, Alex."

"Anytime. You take it easy, too."

He gave her another nod and a half smile, then closed the door and turned to take Emily's hand after slinging his bag over his shoulder. The building was just across from the riverwalk and he imagined the view from the penthouse on the twentieth floor would be spectacular. He tried to get Emily talking as they walked into the lobby.

"So…Your uncle stays here when he's in town?"

"Uh-huh."

"What about your mother? She's coming to town?"

"She…uh…" Emily tried to think, but she couldn't seem to make sense of anything. "Yeah…but…not yet…I don't know…" She trailed off, stood staring at the red light above the elevator doors.

She was dazed, he realized. Shell-shocked. She was silent as they rode the elevator, though he felt her shaking and pulled her close to his side; and when she couldn't manage to put the key in the apartment door because her hands were shaking so badly, he did it for her, then led her inside.

The foyer narrowed to a beautifully appointed gallery, leading into a tastefully decorated living room with fine art on the walls and comfortably expensive furniture. Chippendale tables were mixed with newer, very traditional sofas and chairs, and there was a large entertainment center that housed a state-of-the-art TV, flanked on each side by bookcases filled to the brim, not just with books but with knick-knacks and framed photographs.

There were three very large bedrooms, each with its own bath, and he set his bag in one with a huge four-poster cherry bed while Emily drifted down the hall to the master suite.

He found her there, standing in the huge walk-in closet, staring at the clothes hanging there, still in that trance-like daze. She jumped a little when he touched her shoulder, but her eyes were distant when she looked at him.

"I guess…I should clean up…change…" She shook her head. "I'm in a fog, Bobby. I don't know what to do."

"It's okay, baby." He drew her into his arms. "I do."

Because she seemed so fragile suddenly, he rocked her against him, soothing her with gentle strokes as he walked her from the closet and turned toward the bath. He figured she'd be a bit embarrassed later on by what he was about to do, but he couldn't see any way around it. She was too lost at the moment to care for herself and he wanted her relaxed and comforted, and out of those awful smelling, dirt streaked clothes.

He'd already taken off his jacket and now he eased her down onto the toilet lid, rolled up his shirtsleeves before he turned on the spigot in the enormous claw foot tub. Easily enough he found perfumed shower gels in the cabinet, and bubble bath, too. He squeezed the bottle under the water and the scent of vanilla rose up as the gel frothed and bubbled.

Emily was hardly aware of where she was, but she heard water running and had a vague, distant thought that it was making the stairs slippery. Then Bobby was kneeling in front of her, pulling off her shoes, reaching beneath each pant leg to slide off her trouser socks.

"A hot bath," he said. "That's what you need."

When she only nodded mutely, he lifted her sweater, pulled it slowly over her head. More dirt streaked her skin, turned her white cotton bra an odd mixture of brown and black. He unhooked it, slid it off, and remembered the first time he'd done that.

This time, he wasn't wild with the need for her, or teetering on the edge of insanity. This time he only wanted to bring her back to herself, to soothe and care for her. And though the sight of her stirred him, it was simple enough to push that back until the time was right.

He stood up, took her hands and lifted her to her feet. "Almost there, baby," he murmured and unhooked her slacks, let them drop, then slid her panties down gingerly.

He checked the water temperature before he lifted her into his arms and eased her gently into the tub. She murmured and sighed as the heat of the water closed over her and he shut off the spigot and knelt beside the tub to stroke his fingers over her cheek, into her hair.

He felt the grit of the dirt and knew she'd feel better when it was gone. He used the hand-held sprayer to wet her hair and then he squirted out some of the fruity smelling shampoo he'd found, massaging her scalp and working his fingers through her curls until there was no trace of the dirt left at all.

As he finished rinsing her hair he spoke to her in a soothing tone, but she didn't move or respond, not even when he prodded her a little, asked her if she was alright, if the water was hot enough. She was still lost in the no-man's land of shock.

He took a washcloth and her shower gel and bathed her like a child, fighting back tears as he rinsed off the grime and then drained the tub, filled it again with fresh, clean water and bubbles for her.

Silent tears ran down her face as she laid her head back against the tub and closed her eyes. She still wouldn't talk. He grazed his knuckles along her cheek. "It's okay, baby," he murmured. "You're safe now."

Emily began to come back to herself finally. She lifted one hand from the water and reached for his as she opened her eyes. "Thank you," was all she could manage.

"Anytime." He put a tender kiss on her brow, smoothed a hand over her wet hair. "Sit here and relax for awhile. I'm going to get a shower. We'll order dinner when you get out."

She nodded, closed her eyes again. She wanted to block everything from her mind, not think about what happened at all.

The things she'd seen, and heard, and smelled; what she'd felt as she made her way down those crowded stairs, and when she'd been crouched against that wall, waiting for the end to come.

She didn't want them just now. Not now.

She heard Bobby leave the room, close the door quietly, and for one wild, insane instant, as the silence descended, she was afraid she was dead after all and this was just some kind of after-life illusion.

Her eyes popped open, her heart pounded, and she sat up and stared around the bathroom, assured herself that it was real. She put her hand on the edge of the tub, felt the porcelain slick and smooth beneath her wet fingers. Just to be sure, she tapped the rim and the sound echoed in the stillness.

"I'm okay," she whispered. She slid back down into the water again, leaned her head back against the rim of the tub, and closed her eyes. "Thank you, God."





Bobby stood in the shower, hot water pounding down over his head, and tried to rein in the emotions that were colliding inside of him.

Planes turned into bombs. Who would have thought it would happen like that? And the towers were gone. After being the iconic symbol of the New York City skyline for over twenty-five years, they were both just gone.

Worse than that, the people that had been in them were gone, too. How many were there? They were still working on the estimation, but it was in the thousands at least. Firefighters and Port Authority cops who had been doing what they all lived to do were gone, too.

He wondered how many of them were gone, and if he'd find the names of friends among the dead.

And God. . .God. . .those moments while he'd stood there watching Tower One crashing down, and then searching the streets, looking everywhere for Emily, fearing the worst.

The time he'd spent thinking she was dead was still burning a hole in his chest. He didn't want to think about how close he'd come to losing her; didn't want to think about what he would have done if she hadn't come out alive.

He shook himself, finished rinsing off and then shut off the water. He couldn't break down now, not when Emily needed him to be steady. There would be time enough for him to lose it later, when he was alone.

Once he was dressed in the jeans and t-shirt he'd pulled from his bag, he went out to the kitchen to boil water for tea. It would help Emily relax, maybe soothe her mind a little, if she could keep her routine, and he found the pantry stocked with a variety of teas, which managed to make him smile a little. Anyone who knew Emily, and her love of tea, would take one look at that pantry shelf and know this apartment was a home away from home for her.

He set the kettle on the stove, got out two mugs and the sugar, and then sat down at the table in the breakfast nook to wait for the water to boil.

And had a sudden, searing vision of the words Emily had written on her arm: If found, please call. . .

Oh God. What it would have been like to find her body, to have seen those words, and her name, along with his and her mother's, written by her own shaking hand. It didn't bear thinking about.

The kettle whistled, startled him. He got up, poured the water over the teabags in both mugs, sweetened hers the way she liked it.

His hands were shaking so that he had to set the spoon down and grip the edge of the counter to steady them. The tremors went from his hands to his arms and down to his legs as the wall he had built around his emotions started to crumble.

Down. He had to sit down before his rapidly weakening legs wouldn't hold him up. He sat at the table, still shaking as his eyes filled.

The sights, the sounds. He couldn't get them out of his head.

Flames shooting upward, plumes of smoke rising to fill the sky overhead. People jumping from the windows. That small dot on the horizon that had quickly become a jet. Watching – helpless, impotent – as the jet plowed into the second tower. Listening to Emily's screams echoing through the phone.

The morning had dawned so perfectly. The sky had been so clearly blue it nearly hurt the eyes to look at it. The sun had been shining as brightly as it seemed it could.

And in less than two hours, the world had turned upside down. An ocean lay between them and those that would seek to wreak this kind of terror upon them, and today the whole world had watched that ever-growing tidal wave sweep right across the Atlantic and devastate them.

In one fell swoop, his city and his country had shattered.

So had he.

He could still see those words, written on the inside of Emily's left arm. He had used the alcohol wipe to erase them from her skin, but he couldn't erase them from his own mind.

If found, please call. . .

The tears finally got the best of him and he bowed his head into his hands and wept.





Dressed in flannel pajama pants and a t-shirt, Emily stared at herself in the mirror, at the scratch on her temple, covered with a liquid bandage, the small cuts on her arms. She had bruises all over, on her arms and legs, elbows and knees, on her hips and the back of her shoulders. Nothing broken, though, and no sprains, no tears, thank God. Her body had certainly taken a beating, but it was nothing that wouldn't heal in time, and there was no permanent damage. And thanks to Bobby, the grit was gone from her hair, from her skin. She felt human again.

No worse for wear, she thought. Except that she felt hollow inside, and dazed, as though none of it had happened. Surreal. The word of the day.

She left the bathroom, went to hunt up Bobby and find out what he wanted to order for dinner, though she knew she would have to force herself to eat anything at all. And then, as she neared the kitchen, she heard him crying.

Her own heart cracked right down the middle, then spider-webbed as a thousand tiny aches splintered it and tore it open. Her throat closed and her eyes filled before she even reached the kitchen doorway, to say nothing of how she felt when she saw Bobby, the strongest man she knew, sitting bent over the kitchen table with his head bowed into his hands, his body shaking as he sobbed.

She went to him, started to put her arms around him, and he turned and grabbed her into his arms so hard she nearly lost her breath, and then he was tugging her down onto his knee so he could bury his face in her shoulder. She held on tight and cried with him. Not only for herself, but for the others. The ones who hadn't made it.

For those firefighters who had still been too many floors up when the building came down, and the police officers who had been working so hard to help secure everything and direct people to safety.

For the people on the floors above her who had never, ever had a chance. For the ones who had jumped from those windows. The ones whose screams she could still hear, echoing in the chambers of her mind.

For the people on those planes who had not known they would never reach their destination.

No one had known that such a beautiful Tuesday morning in September would be the day death would come to claim them. They were husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. They were someone's daughter, or son, or grandparent, or friend.

And they were gone. They were just gone.

And she was still here.

She was still here. How had she been spared, when so many had been lost?

A question she would likely never have the answer to.

A gift that she would treasure, this life she'd been allowed to keep. This life that she wanted to spend with Bobby.

Even while the tears were falling, she moved to cover his face with kisses. And then their mouths connected and she kissed him with a passion born from tasting death and still being alive.

"Emily…oh God…" He rubbed his lips over hers, tasted the salt of their tears. "I looked for you everywhere," he whispered. "I thought you were gone…that I'd never see you again."

"I'm here," she murmured against his mouth. "I'm here."

"I love you, Emily. I love you so much." His voice broke as the sobs took him again. "I don't…I would've been so lost without you, Em…I don't know what I would've done if…if you…"

She silenced him with a tender kiss. "Don't," she murmured. "Just hold me, Bobby. I don't want to think about anything but you."

He closed his eyes and gathered her closer. "I don't think I ever want to let you out of my sight again," he said thickly.

Emily laid her head on his shoulder with a tearful sigh. "I could go for that."

He sat holding her as the tears continued to slide down his face, trying not to think about how close he had come to losing her. "I made you some tea," he murmured, stroking her hair. "I thought it might help you relax a little better."

"It might." Emily burrowed deeper into his arms. "This helps more."

"Oh, baby…" Cradling her against him, he stood up and carried her into the living room, set her on the sofa. "I'll be right back with your tea," he told her as he pressed a soft kiss to her forehead.

She sat quietly, keeping her mind deliberately blank, and waited for him to come back and hand her the tea that he had reheated in the microwave for her. A few sips of that fragrant sweetness soothed her throat, and her nerves. Climbing over into Bobby's lap the moment he sat down soothed them even more.

She didn't want to talk, or to think. She just wanted to feel his arms around her and know that she was really there; that she was really alive.

He didn't give her words because he sensed she just wanted to be held. And so he cuddled her close and rocked her, kissing her softly, and often, grateful that she had come back to him.

And hours later, by way of silent agreement, they fell asleep curled together in one bed, seeking comfort and refuge in each other's arms while, just a few miles away, the skeletal remains of the World Trade Center still burned.

I might need to wait until I get home tonight to comment on this; I think I need time to process it. Or maybe I'll give it a try. The fanfic series I'm writing also started in season 1, and the second story dealt with 9/11. But I stayed away from any attempts to describe what the survivors experienced because I didn't think I could accurately describe not only the event but the emotions. You, however, have just blown me away with this story. I can't speak to the accuracy of the events, but it feels real to me. And you were able to make me feel that I was there with Emily, experiencing everything with her. And there with Bobby, experiencing everything with him, as well. This is powerful and gut-wrenching. I'm certainly ready for more, but I think I'm glad I have to be at work all day where I can just let this amazing story simmer in my brain.

I did a great deal of research when I decided to put Emily inside the collapse. Matt, Rick, and Sal are made up names, but there really is a Chief Picciotto. He's written a book about that day, but it wasn't out at the time I wrote this. I used accounts I read online from another book, told from the perspective of one of the other firefighters, whose name escapes me now. And there really was a firefighter named Jay in there as well, but the ones I characterized and wrote dialouge for, I made up. "Sandra" is a real person named Josephine, though I don't know much about her beyond the fact that she was a heavy-set 59-nine-year-old grandmother who was so tired she just didn't think she could go on. The story of those firefighters stopping to help her down the stairs touched me when I read it and I decided then and there to involve Emiliy in it, too.

I blended the facts I did have with my own impression of what it might have been like and hoped it would ring true. From the sound of your comments, it did, and I'm really glad for that. It's what I was striving for.

Chapter 5 is still in my head, and ready to come out, so I'll be working on it for the next few days. I'll post it as soon as it's ready.

Again, thanks so much for you encouraging reviews. It's always been my goal to make the reader feel what my characters feel...to write from the perspective of being inside my characters' hearts and minds...to not just tell the story but to evoke the emotions that flow through it. It seems to be working!

Outerbankschick,
I'm speechless. I could finally take the time and read your ff and I'm looking forward to reading chapter 5. An acquaintance of mine was in Tower two, lower floors so he and his coworkers managed to get out on time. I remember that afternoon like it happened yesterday (it was 3pm in Italy) and it always saddens my heart. Your writing is exceptional. I can't wait to read more. Thank you for sharing it with us here.
GTS

Thank you very much for the compliments.

I really tried to get my ducks in a row before I wrote chapters 3 & 4, because I wanted it to sound real. I read so many accounts of that day, my eyes were crossing! But I needed the correct timelines and such, because I was putting my main characters right in the midst of everything. I've only been to NYC once, and then I was only there for a few hours, and the one thing that I did that night was to go to the top of the WTC. I even got out onto the roof for the laser light show that night. The view was spectacular!

OBC -- You're now one of the few people in the whole world who can say they've been to the top of the WTC and seen the laser light show. No wonder it was so important to you to write this story.

I can't say it any better than ciaddict did. You captured all of this perfectly. The thought of Bobby sitting at a table, crying...no, sobbing for his fallen comrades, his friends and colleagues, hsi city and his country, was beautiful. I know there were many in his shoes that day and the days that followed: grieving and mourning, yet rejoicing sadly that their loved ones were alive.

I can't wait to see how you play this story out! I'm ready for chapter 5! I'll just sit here on the sofa and wait for you to get it finished.

Thank you! I'm glad that this story is coming out the way I want it to, with the emotional impact I was shooting for.

I reached back into the past and called up what I was thinking that day, what I was feeling - the emotional roller coaster of those first few days - to get that feeling of realism into it, and to convey the shock that turned into grief. Because I was once up there, on the observation deck and the roof, it's very, very difficult for me to actually sit and think about how it must have felt to be trapped above the impact zone and know that you were not going to be able to get out. It still shocks me to see footage of those dark little forms falling from the tower. It doesn't matter how many years go by, those images will haunt me forever.

I am getting ready to do a little work on Chapter 5 before I go to bed. My mind is working right now, so I'll have to let it run down before I can sleep.

Edited to add: I have a souvenier coffee mug from the gift shop on the observation deck of the WTC. It has a silouette of the NYC skyline with the Twin Towers standing tall and proud. That's one mug that will never be given away. One day my children and grandchildren (when I have them) will ask me about it and I'll tell them the story of how I only had a few hours in NYC and the one thing I decided to do was go to the top of the WTC, which is how I got the mug. I bought it just before the gift shop closed for the night.

Whew...finally got Chapter 5 done and ready to go. Took me awhile to get through...had to get emotional again. LOL! I hope y'all like it. There is a little bit of strong language toward the end...just a heads up.

I may have to post it in two parts...we'll see...

What Matters Most

Chapter 5

The sun was so bright. Emily stood at the windows, gazing out. The sky – it was so blue. The color of those pretty bluebells her mother had planted in the garden when she was a child. The city was gleaming in the sunlight, windows glinting, reflecting a thousand points of light. Beyond the battery lay the harbor, sparkling in the morning sun, dotted by ferries and pleasure boats.

Something blocked the sunlight. Clouds? Maybe a swift moving thunderhead? And then she heard – and felt – the thunder. The floor rippled beneath her feet and she turned to find the ceiling caving in behind her, cutting her off from Jim and Charles, and all the others.

Fire spewed, smoke billowed.

Down. She had to get down. Stay close to the floor, get to the exit.

The building was going to fall any minute.

Darkness now. No more sunlight. Everything was gray.

Go! her mind screamed. Go now!

Climbing over rubble now, pieces of the ceiling hanging down. Watch out for the wires. No, that's not a wire. She looked at what brushed her shoulder. An arm. And there – a leg.

Her mouth opened in the silent scream of nightmares. She fell over something, looked down, and scrambled away from the bodies that lay twisted in a heap beneath her.

Bodies. That's what she was climbing over. Mangled, broken bodies.

Thunder roared again, and the blackness came. No light. She couldn't see. All alone now. All alone.

The smell. Oh, God…the smell! Everything was burning, melting, crumbling.

Help me! Oh dear God! Someone help me!

The floor dropped away and she was falling…falling…

She woke screaming, clawing at the air and kicking her feet.

Bobby bolted upright in the bed at the sound of her screams, his heart hammering in his chest. Emily was flailing about, her hands reaching out to clutch at the air as she bucked and rolled, as though trying to fight her way out from beneath the covers.

"Emily…wake up." He gave her a gentle shake. "Come on, baby…wake up."

She shot up in the bed, one of her flailing hands connecting with his shoulder. "Help me!" she cried. "Help me!"

"It's okay, Em." He wrapped his arms around her even as she struggled with him. "It's a dream, baby. You're okay."

His voice penetrated and she stopped thrashing about. "Bobby?" she choked out.

"I'm here," he said softly as he rocked her in his arms. "I'm right here."

She turned her face into his chest, and the scent of him was familiar and comforting. She smelled his soap and shampoo, the faint scent of mint from where he'd accidentally dropped a clump of toothpaste on his t-shirt, and that unique smell that was all his. She breathed deeply and drew him in, seeking to rid herself of the lingering smell of burning rubble and bodies.

"The sky," she gasped. "I was in the conference room, staring out the window, and the sky was so blue…and then everything got dark and the thunder came. The ceiling caved in and I was trapped. And the floor…the floor disappeared…it just dropped out from under me and I was falling into the dark. There was nothing…I couldn't see anything…I just…"

"Sshh…" Bobby brushed a hand over her damp hair. "It's over, Emily. You're safe now." He kept rocking her, rubbing her back slowly, until he felt her relax against him. "Do you want me to get you some water?"

Emily shook her head, clung tighter. "Just hold me," she said. "It's better when you're holding me."

He eased them both back down, tucked her against his side. "Go back to sleep, baby," he whispered. "I'm here."

She snuggled against him, pillowed her head on his shoulder. "What time is it?"

"A little after three."

"Great. The three a.m. willies." She sighed. "Why do nightmares always wake you at three in the morning? Is that some kind of dream rule or something?"

He smiled in the darkness, rubbed his hand down her arm. She sounded a little more like herself now. "If there's some kind of rulebook for dreams, I'm sure it's in there."

She was quiet for awhile, her mind besieged by the frightening images of her dream, and the more frightening memories of the attack. She couldn't close her eyes without seeing that second plane barreling down on the other tower, the explosion and the flames, the sound of everything shattering as it hit.

And worse, she couldn't shut out the sounds and the smells as the building came toppling down while she huddled beneath two firefighters and waited to die.

But she hadn't. She was alive. She was still trying to process that, still trying to understand it, and she still felt a little numb, as though the whole thing had been a dream. Except that the soreness in her body told her it hadn't.

She turned into Bobby more tightly, pressed her face against his neck. "I was so scared today," she murmured. "But it all seems like a dream…like it didn't really happen. I mean, how could it? How could people just take control of an airplane like that and fly it into a building? It seems like it just shouldn't happen like that. Those poor people…they thought they were flying home, or to visit someone, or whatever. And now they're all dead. And the others…"

She leaned up on one elbow then, trembling with anger wrapped in cotton wool, so that she wasn't sure if she was really feeling it or not. Her emotions were still in the cocoon of shock and the anger felt very far away.

"God, Bobby…those people today…what did they do wrong? All they did was go to work, for God's sake!"

"Emily…" He lifted a hand to touch her cheek. "Don't try and understand it," he said softly. "You can't."

She bent over him, laid her cheek over his heart. "I feel so bad for them," she said as her eyes filled with tears. "So many of them couldn't get out. And while I was going down all those stairs, I was thinking about how glad I was that I wasn't one of them. That the plane didn't take out our floor, too. How selfish is that?" she ended as she began to cry.

"It's not selfish, Em." He stroked her head gently, wishing he could find the right words, that he knew what to say to comfort her. "There's nothing wrong with being glad you survived." And now he wrapped his arms tightly around her. "I'm glad you made it, too," he whispered. "For awhile, I really thought you hadn't. I can't even tell you what it felt like…thinking that you were gone. I don't have the words."

He didn't need them. Emily could feel what it was like in the way he held her, hear it in the sudden thudding of his heart. She turned to press her lips against his shirt, just over his heart.

It wasn't enough, just one tiny kiss, so she did it again, and again, until she made her way up to his throat. His hands were in her hair now, his fingers curling around her head as she lifted her mouth to find his in the soft darkness.

Alive. She was alive.

She felt it when they kissed, when his lips parted and his tongue slid lazily into her mouth to tease hers. She felt it when he tugged her on top of him so he could kiss her more deeply, wrap his arms around her more tightly.

And she felt him, very much alive, as his body quivered beneath hers, hard as steel, as she caught his bottom lip between her teeth.

"Emily…" He could barely push out his breath as she gnawed gently on his lip and sent a blast of heat straight through his center.

"Touch me," she whispered. "Just touch me."

"I'm not…I mean, I don't have anything with me…" He was caught now in that place between giving in and being responsible.

"It's okay," she murmured, trailing her lips over his jaw. "I'm on the Pill."

One question answered, but he still had one more, to satisfy the part of him that felt he was responsible for her. "Emily…baby, are you sure?"

"Yes," she whispered. "I need you, Bobby. I want you to touch me. I need to feel…to know I'm alive..."

He caught her face in his hands, looked up at her in the gray shadows. He could see her eyes shining in the dark and knew that there were tears. Even as he watched, he saw the glimmer of one of them as it slipped over her lashes and began a slow descent down her cheek.

He tugged her closer and kissed it away. More fell, and he kissed them, too, and then took her mouth, slow and soft. She moved against him, her mouth growing hot against his, and lighting the fire of his need.

Her hands slid beneath his t-shirt, seeking flesh, wanting to feel him, to feel the blood humming beneath his skin as he trembled with the same need that was growing inside of her. She trailed her mouth along his throat, felt his hands in her hair again as she rubbed her smooth cheek over the roughness of his.

"I need you," she whispered again. "I need you so much."

He murmured her name as he let his hands roam gently along her body. Not like before; this time there was no hurry, just a slow, simmering passion that rose between them as their lips met and their bodies moved together in a lazy rhythm as they slowly undressed each other.

Emily knew what to expect now, what she would feel as his hands slid over her flesh. Except that it was different than before. This time there was no rush, no wild, leaping flames. This time there was a slow burning fire, and every touch, every stroke of those long, gentle fingers stoked the embers that smoldered within her until her entire body was shimmering with heat.

His hands glided over her skin, taking care with her bruises, lightly stroking, seeking, treasuring, exploring every dip and curve. He needed to touch her as much as she needed to be touched, and he wanted her like he'd never wanted before. She quivered and sighed beneath his hands, murmured softly as he took her breast in his mouth and moaned with that first erotic taste of her.

Her innocence made him control his own need, keep the pace slow and gentle. He wanted her to remember every touch, every moment, and when his hand slid down to cup her lightly, she moaned, long and low. He felt it vibrating in her throat before it trembled from her mouth into his.

His mouth was soft and hot on hers, his fingers lightly brushing her skin, teasing and tantalizing before they slid slowly into her. She arched upward, alive to the moment, to everything. He was nibbling on her lips as his fingers stroked her in slow, lazy circles, until she thought her entire body should have been glowing like an iron just pulled from the fire.

Up and up, until she tensed like a spring wound too tight, and then, finally, the release, the stunning wonder of it that left her quaking and moaning even as he took her up again. Her hips rocked in rhythm with his hand as she reached to curl her fingers into his hair, nipping lightly at his lip as she slid over that glittering edge one more time.

Her hands drifted down to his shoulders to stroke and caress, then down over his chest, testing, and torturing. Without design, her thumb fluttered over one of his nipples and he sucked in a breath as her mouth sought his, offering, and asking. It was all he could do to keep the pace gentle when her hands were sliding along his skin, lighting tiny fires wherever they touched him, to say nothing of the inferno raging inside of him.

She could feel him quivering, feel the want, the need, that burned inside of him. She trailed her hands back down, wanting to touch him, and yet unsure of how, or what to do, and then his hand was there, taking hers, guiding it, showing her how to pleasure him. A long, deep moan slid from his throat as she touched him, stroking, exploring, desiring to know everything about him. His lips came back to hers, hungry, greedy, as little purrs of pleasure vibrated between them.

"Emily." He whispered her name, his voice husky with desire as she stroked him slowly toward madness. "I want to be inside you."

A flash of heat lanced through her at his words and she pressed her lips against his throat. "Yes," she whispered.

He shifted a little, and she moved her legs aside in welcome even as she tensed a little at the thought of what she had always heard would cause pain. One of his hands came up to touch her face, and she realized he knew.

"I'll be careful," he whispered, stroking her cheek. "It might hurt a little, Em…but only a little. I promise."

She cupped his face with her hands, looked up at him in the shadows and shifting twilight of the pre-dawn darkness. "I trust you," she said softly. "I'm not afraid."

Undone, he bent to brush his lips against hers. "I love you, Emily," he said. "I really love you." And then he slid slowly, gently, inside of her.

Emily gave a quick gasp at the shock of sensation as his body joined with hers. There was pain, but only for a single instant, and then there was nothing but the marvelous wonder of their bodies merging and becoming one.

She was so small and tight, and hot. With a soft groan that was part pleasure and part relief, he took her slowly, opening her with long, gentle strokes and a tenderness he hadn't known he possessed. Her hands reached for his, and when he laced his fingers through hers, he knew they were forging a link that would last. Palm to palm, with fingers entwined, they clung together as he moved inside her.

What a lovely, beautiful dance they did. Their bodies were in sync, their rhythm perfectly in time. Emily flew on each new sensation, on the beauty of that strange friction as he moved within her. The ache sweetened, and grew, until she was throbbing with it, burning with it. Her body was molten and fluid as it lifted and moved with his in a dance that was as old as time itself.

"Only you," he whispered against her ear as he lifted their joined hands above her head, slid deeper into her. "I'll never love anyone but you."

"Bobby…" She pressed her face into his neck, felt him reaching deep, reaching for her heart. "I love you."

He lost himself then, in the softness of her, in the depth of what he felt for her. He let go of her hands to cradle her head, to cover her mouth with his as he took more of her. He tasted love in her mouth, felt it pouring into his every cell as the sweetness of it hummed through him like a song.

Oh, the aching beauty of it, the wonder of him…inside of her. She was melting into him, her body molding to his as she sought to open herself, to give him everything, and to take everything he gave. That glorious, throbbing ache built and built, until she came in a long, warm gush that tore a cry of delight from her throat. She wrapped herself around him and held on, held on, with her mouth fused to his as he gave a low, moaning cry and filled her with liquid fire.

They lay wrapped together afterward, lips meeting, hands softly stroking. Whatever madness still lurked outside, inside they were safe, cocooned in tenderness and comfortably tangled in the sheets, and in each other.

Emily danced her fingers up and down his back, enjoyed the feeling of that long, wonderful body pressed against hers, still joined with hers. She belonged to him now, and he to her. She felt him nuzzling her neck with his lips and her own curved into a dreamy smile.

"I didn't know it would be like that," she murmured.

"Neither did I." He lifted himself onto his elbows, brushed his fingers through her hair. "It didn't hurt too much, did it?"

"No." His gentle concern touched her. She lifted one of her hands to his cheek. "It was wonderful. I already want to do it again."

He gave a soft laugh and rested his brow on hers. "You'll have to give me a few minutes."

"Oh…yeah…there's a name for that," she said thoughtfully. "I read it somewhere…a refractory period, right?"

He laughed out loud at that, let his head drop onto her shoulder. "Oh…geez…" Still chuckling, he turned and put a soft kiss on her neck. "You're perfect for me."

"Well, I could've told you that a long time ago," she said with a small laugh. It felt so good to be able to laugh, to put everything else aside for the moment. "So…how long do you need?"

"Emily!" he exclaimed with what sounded very much like a giggle.

"Holy cow," she laughed. "Are you giggling?"

"Of course not." He choked off the next one before it had a chance to slip out. "Guys don't giggle."

"My fanny! You're giggling!"

He couldn't hold back the laughter and he let it out as he shifted, then rolled with her until she was sprawled over his chest. "Okay, okay," he said. "It was a giggle. You happy now? They're gonna make me turn in my man card."

"What they don't know won't hurt," she teased, trailing a fingertip down his nose. "And I'll never tell."

He lifted his hands and cupped her face gently, the simple fun of their laughter making his feelings so much easier to share. "You make me so happy, Em," he said softly. "I didn't…I never thought I'd be able to feel like this."

"Oh…" Her eyes filled. "That sound you hear is my heart melting."

"I love you, Emily." He brushed his thumbs over her cheeks as he brought her mouth to his for a soft kiss. "I want to spend my life with you."

"You…what?" She looked down at him, trembling with surprise, and longing. "What are you saying?"

He hadn't planned it, but it seemed so right, and the words were there, just on the tip of his tongue. All he had to do was say them. And suddenly he found that he could, that there was no more uncertainty, no more apprehension. "Emily, I…I want to marry you."

For a moment, Emily felt as if she'd been struck mute. Even while her heart soared, her voice just wouldn't work. "You…I…oh, wow," she finally managed. "I don't know what to say…"

His heart climbed into his throat and stuck there. "Well…what about 'yes'?" he asked hesitantly.

"Oh, that's a given," she told him. "Absolutely." And then she gave a soft laugh when she heard his sigh of relief. "What?" she asked. "Did you actually think I'd say 'no'?"

"I never even considered it," he answered, his voice less than steady. "Until two seconds ago."

"Sorry, honey." She bent to kiss him lightly. "You caught me off guard. My tongue got tangled up."

"Mine's been tangled for awhile, when it comes to you, so that's fair." He drew her down for another kiss. "I think you should meet my mother," he said quietly.

"Oh…" She sighed happily. "I'd like that." And then her heart gave another tiny leap and danced around in her chest. "Oh, wow!" she giggled. "Did we just decide we're getting married?"

"Yeah." He stroked a hand over her hair. "I think we did."

"Wow," she said again. "And here I was thinking I'd have to ease you into it!"

"Oh?" His lips quirked into a smile. "You've been thinking about it, then?"

"Oh, yes." She brushed her mouth over his, soft and light. "I certainly have." And feeling more bold than shy, she walked her fingers over the curve of his hip, lightly trailed them along the inside of his thigh. "Had enough time yet?" she teased.

At the soft brush of her fingers, he went rock hard. "Oh, yeah," he said huskily as he reached for her. "Plenty."



When next Emily woke, sunlight was filtering through the blinds and the clock on the bedside table told her it was just after nine. Bobby was already up and she could smell coffee, which meant breakfast probably wasn't far behind. She stretched beneath the covers and felt her muscles protest.

Odd how memories could crash into one another. The slight soreness between her thighs brought back sweet memories of the love she and Bobby had shared in the night, and the achy tenderness of the rest of her reminded her of the horror of the day before. It was a strange combination.

She climbed gingerly out of bed, fished around for her pajama pants and put them on, then tugged Bobby's dark blue t-shirt over her head and went to brush her teeth. She stood for a moment, looking at herself in the mirror, smiling at the way his shirt swallowed her. She hardly saw the cut on her temple, or even the ones on her arms. Instead, she saw the tiniest bit of flush in her cheeks, the glow of love in her eyes.

Bobby wanted to marry her.

She gave a dreamy sigh, lifted the hem of the shirt and pressed it to her face so she could smell him. And she stood with a dopey smile on her face as she finished brushing her teeth, then washed her face. She didn't walk out into the hallway, she floated.

The TV was on. She could hear the sound, but couldn't make out the words and then she turned into the living room, intending to keep going into the kitchen to find Bobby, and breakfast. She glanced at the TV, and the images there stopped her cold, had her sucking in a sharp breath.

"…the South Tower," the anchorwoman was saying. "The second to be hit, but the first to collapse."

Emily stood rooted to the spot as she watched the building crumble down, spewing out smoke, dust, and debris. She listened to the comments of the others as they described the pandemonium that had occurred in the streets around the area of the World Trade Center.

Her heart pounded in her ears so that she hardly heard the rest of what was said as she watched the North Tower burning, and realized that this was what everyone had been watching the day before while she was fighting her way down that smoke-filled stairway.

"Then," the anchorwoman continued, "at approximately 10:28 a.m., the North Tower also collapsed. You can see here, as it begins to crumble, that it simply pancaked down onto itself."

Now her heart wasn't pounding. She was sure it had stopped. She stared and stared, watching as that antennae began to list to one side and then the top half of the building started to crumble.

She'd been under there.

She'd been on the landing of the fourth floor, with Matt and Rick doing their best to hold onto her. And all the while, people all over the world had been watching the building collapse on television. Bobby had been watching it from the window. He'd watched the entire thing. What he must have felt, wondering if she'd gotten out, and not knowing if he'd find her alive.

"Oh…" She gasped, sucked in air, tried to tear her eyes away from the footage as it replayed yet again. And found she couldn't. "Oh my God!"

Bobby heard that strangled cry and rushed in from the kitchen, silently cursing himself for leaving the news on. "Emily…"

She looked over at him, her eyes wide, the expression on her face so odd, sort of a delayed reaction; a mixture of shock and fear. "I was…oh my God…" She couldn't seem to form the words. "Bobby…I was…in…there…"

Her voice gave out at the same time as her legs and she simply fell silent as she sat straight down onto the floor. She still couldn't tear her eyes from the images on the screen, now focusing on the attack on the Pentagon.

"I'm sorry, Em…don't watch that…." Bobby went to the TV, started to turn it off.

"No...I want to see it." Emily shook her head slowly, her hand resting over her racing heart. "I need to see it."

He left it on, then backed up and lowered himself to the floor beside her. She was trembling all over and he put his arm around her, rubbed his hand up and down her back as they sat watching the recap of the previous day's events, and the updates on the estimated casualties. It was still in the thousands, though not as high as previously thought.

The footage of the collapse of both towers ran again and again behind the anchorwoman as she continued to pose questions to the various experts and search and rescue officials.

"And then there was the miraculous rescue of those who were trapped inside Stairway B of Tower One," she went on with a nod to the man across from her. "We have footage from one of our local stations…here…you can see the firefighters that were trapped, along with two civilians, coming down from the debris pile. An amazing moment…the cheers…you can hear them…and this…a welcome change from the shocked and frightened faces…a reunion of some sort…"

Emily's mouth fell open as she watched herself running toward Bobby with her arms outstretched. She hadn't been aware of anything but him, had never noticed the people with cameras that were hovering around, trying to get closer. And there it was, for everyone to see, two people holding tight to one another in the middle of the debris-and-ash-covered street, just a few yards from the site of what was possibly the worst disaster in their nation's history.

The panel discussed the rescue effort, the fires still burning, the fact that rescue personnel weren't giving up, that there was still hope that some may have survived beneath the rubble. If a handful of people could survive in a stairwell, then there might be hope for more survivors to be found. People were coming from all over to help sift through the debris, hoping for another miracle.

"I can't imagine they'll find anyone else," Emily said almost to herself. "But maybe…"

Bobby lifted her into his lap, cradled her there. "I'm just glad they found you," he said softly.

She turned away from the picture on the screen, buried her face in the curve of his shoulder. "Me, too," she choked through her aching throat.

He wrapped her tighter and felt his eyes filling again. He'd thought he was through crying, but he was wrong. He sat rocking Emily in his arms as silent tears slid down his face.

"I'm so glad you're okay," he whispered. "I'm just so glad you're okay."

Emily held onto him, held tight, as the images she had seen replayed in her mind. She couldn't imagine how Bobby must have felt as he watched the collapse, how those others must have felt, watching as their loved ones died. The reports of those heart-wrenching phone calls from the trapped people in the buildings to their loved ones, just to say goodbye, tore at her heart.

All that time, she'd been doggedly descending the stairs while, above her, people were dialing their husbands, or their wives, their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, boyfriends and girlfriends…and saying terrible, tearful goodbyes, knowing that there was no hope of them getting out. And some of them had chosen to jump from those shattered windows into the oblivion of the air rather than waiting for the smoke or the flames to claim them.

"Oh, God…Bobby, those poor people…" Sobbing, she clung to him. "So many of them…"

He held her close and let the tears fall. He had no words for his feelings at the moment. They were too raw. And he didn't even want to think about what he would be doing right now if she hadn't made it.

The ringing phone sounded foreign and much too loud, and startled them both. Emily choked off a sob, looked around in abstract confusion, and then got slowly to her feet to answer it while Bobby got up to turn off the TV. He'd seen enough, and he didn't want Emily to watch it anymore. Bad enough she'd had to experience it, he didn't want her reliving it every fifteen minutes.

"I'm okay, Uncle Paddy," she was saying as she perched on the edge of the sofa, rubbing at her wet cheeks with the back of her free hand. "I'm still in the city…at the Sutton Place apartment....yeah, everything's a mess here. I don't know if I'll be able to get home today or even tonight. Some of the trains are running again, but everything's so jammed up…"